; 



K 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

— 









UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE: 



AN INQUIRY INTO 



ITS CHARACTER AND ITS CONTENTS. 



BY 



4V V 



D. W. FAUNCE, D.D. 



"Of the scientific method, the first law is that whatever phenomena 
is, is. We must ignore no existence whatever. Phenomena demand 
explanation. If men do feel, act, and love as if they were not merely 
the brief products of a casual conjunction of atoms, but the instru- 
ments of far-reaching progress, are we to record other phenomena and 
pass over this ? Let us investigate those instincts of the human mind 
by which man is led to work as if the approval of a Higher Being were 
the aim of life." — Principles of Science : Jevons. 






PHILADELPHIA : 



WfcSW^' 



AMEEICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIE1 

1420 CHESTNUT STREET. 






ft 




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1881, by the 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Westcott & Thomson, 
Stereotypers and Electrotypers, Philada. 



TO 

HIS TKUSTED FEIEND, 
Hon. ELISHA S. CONVERSE, 

THIS LITTLE VOLUME 
is 

BY THE AUTHOE. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The writer of this little book has in mind four 
classes of readers. 

There are, first, those who do not accept as a fact 
what is popularly known as the " religious experience." 

There are, secondly, those who admit the phenom- 
ena to be true to a man's own consciousness, but 
they question whether there are any answering facts 
outside the man's own mind ; whether it is not all a 
subjective feeling, with no corresponding objective 
realities ; a shadow of the man's own self, rather than 
the reflected radiance of his God; a delusion hon- 
estly believed, but a delusion certain to be dispelled 
in a more complete development. To such persons, 
this volume addresses an argument in proof that this 
Christian experience involves certain objective facts 
of history and truths of doctrine, without which it 
could never have occurred. So that this Christian 
experience becomes, when carefully considered, an 

I* 5 



6 PREFATORY NOTE. 

unanswerable proof of truths which are also received 
through intellectual processes ; the head and the 
heart each bearing a separate witness, and each con- 
firming and supplementing the other, the profoundest 
experiences of the soul adding their testimony to the 
most careful decisions of our logical nature when we 
ask the question of the ages, " What is truth ?" 

There are, also, those who think that this Christian 
experience is fruitful in answers to certain questions 
about God and the soul w T hich are agitating the minds 
of many thoughtful persons to-day. If we get the 
soul at its best in these experiences of religion, if it 
is nearest its normal condition in these moral exer- 
cises, then we can put to it our inquiries and get 
from it the most satisfactory answers. There are 
questions in philosophy and theology in which the 
appeal is made to the common consciousness of the 
race. But the broadest possible form of conscious- 
ness is this Christian consciousness. This mirror is 
the most perfect and reflects the most things. 

There are, fourth, many excellent Christians who 
are specially interested in any book which discusses 
that work of God in the human soul about which 
they claim to have experimental knowledge. 

In the first chapter, the problem is stated as it 
presents itself, by turns, to these differing classes of 



PREFATORY NOTE. 7 

readers. In the second chapter, and also, in greater 
completeness, in the third chapter, the proofs of the 
reality and of the character of this experience are 
recited. But, instead of quoting the great represen- 
tative names of Christendom, it has seemed better to 
quote that great common experience to which mil- 
lions of men, of all grades of culture and in all the 
Christian centuries, have made claim. So that, avoid- 
ing all abnormal experiences, we are free to quote 
those experiences which all Christians at once recog- 
nize as belonging to the essentials of experimental 
religion. It does not comport with the plan of an 
argument that grounds itself solely on the hand- 
writing in the soul to quote directly from the Bible- 
The few quotations introduced are not named as 
proof-texts. But a summary of Christian feeling is 
sometimes so happily expressed in a biblical phrase, 
that the attempt to avoid it would be as absurd as to 
avoid an apt phrase because used by any other class 
of writers. And one may take the testimony of 
David and of Paul as quickly as that of Socrates 
and of Coleridge, on the question of what they are 
taught by their own consciousness. 

In the fourth chapter, the necessary limitations of 
the Christian experience are considered. And it is 
shown to be pure and reliable, not when placed above 



8 PREFATORY NOTE. 

the Scriptures, nor used aside from them, but when 
it is submitted to the standards of the Bible and 
engrafted directly upon its teachings. In the fifth 
chapter, the question is raised as to what truths of 
natural and revealed religion are involved in this 
experience; and the confirmations of them are 
specified. In the sixth chapter, the fact is pointed 
out, that this experience does not complete itself in 
this world. It demands another. And the peculiar 
prophecies and preparations and anticipations, as to 
both body and soul, which are demanded by experi- 
mental religion, are briefly named. 

The book is written in the hope that, as some former 
volumes have been helpful to struggling souls, it may 
please God to make this effort also of use to any who 
may follow its argument. D. W. F. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

The Christian Experience as a Problem 11 

1. The Profession Made. 

2. The Interests at Stake. 

3. The Questions Involved. 

CHAPTER II. 
The Christian Experience as a Reality 24 

1. The Convictions that Produce it. 

2. The Forms of the Sin-consciousness. 

3. The SouPs Review of its Condition. 

CHAPTER III. 
The Christian Experience as a Renovation 65 

1. The Testimony of Christians. 

2. The Sense of Light and Vision. 
. 3. The Sense of Life and Liberty. 

4. The Sense of the Divine Leading. 

5. The Sense of the Divine Forgiveness. 



10 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTEE IV. 

PAGE 

The Christian Experience in its Limitations 103 

1. As Limited by the Human Element. 

2. As Limited by Partial Development. 

3. As Limited by Wrong Standards. 

4. As Limited by Unfair Tests. 

CHAPTER V. 
The Christian Experience as a Confirmation... 152 

1. The Soul as Knowing God. 

2. The Soul as Knowing Christ. 

3. The Soul as Knowing Itself. 

4. The Soul as Knowing God's Word. 

5. The Soul as Knowing Righteousness. 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Christian Experience as a Prophecy 200 

1. Of a Future Existence. 

2. Of a Future Resurrection. 

3. Of a Future Judgment. 

4. Of a Future Heaven. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 



CHAPTER I. 

CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AS A PROBLEM. 

When a noble ship, freighted with precious 
merchandise and yet more precious lives, is near 
a rocky shore, and in that position is overtaken 
by a fierce storm, which, crossing the Atlantic 
and gathering strength with every mile it travels, 
pours itself at length with terrible fury on that 
struggling vessel, the question that agitates the 
hearts of the sympathizing spectators on the 
shore, and of the more anxious mariners on board 
is this : Will the ship be able to outride the fear- 
ful storm? And when cordage creaks and tim- 
bers groan, and the hoarse surf, beating itself to 

yeasty waves on the rocky shore, is both seen and 

11 



12 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

heard by all, the inquiries come thick and fast 
about anchor and cable, about the ship herself, 
and whether she was well built and well fur- 
nished in all that can make a vessel staunch and 
safe. To-day, looking off upon the Christian 
world, and seeing the thousands that are ventur- 
ing out upon the religious life, we find ourselves 
asking the same questions : How will they stand 
the voyage they are beginning? Have they made 
provision for possible contingencies of meeting the 
rough storm, and of being driven dangerously 
near to a rock-bound coast? 

So ask spectators, as they look on and mark 
those who make the profession of religion. They 
watch such as they go out upon an ocean that has 
indeed sunny days, but is also sometimes swept by 
tempests; and which, if it has blessed ports of 
peace, has also vast and terrible reefs upon its 
coasts, over w T hich the hungry waves roar for their 
prey. If any living is serious business, how much 
more so is Christian living ? There is a sense in 
which a man takes its risks alone. Christian pa- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 13 

rents, Sunday-school teachers, kind and devout 
friends, may go with us a little way at the outset 
of the voyage ; they who saw the building and 
the launching of the craft may accompany one 
down through the friendly islands that guard the 
harbor's mouth, and out past the lower light ; but 
at length the signal is given, the line is cast off, 
and the tender returns to the port, while one must 
go on the voyage alone. Alone ? No, not alone. 
For Christian believers insist that they can take 
up into their experience the words of One who 
said, " Lo, I am with you alway." It was a very 
wonderful promise which, they say, he made — the 
promise of the perpetual presence. And in that 
promise of this Personage, and in the correspond- 
ing claim of a vast number of persons that they 
have experienced its fulfilment, there is opened 
one of the grandest subjects of human inquiry. 
Herein lies the possibility of an experience that is 
vastly more than the outcome of our natural and 
unassisted faculty for religion — the possibility of 
a divine energy pervading our human powers. 



14 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

What if we here find a very peculiar class of 
phenomena arising from " the life of God " in us, 
as well as from our life in God — an experience 
that is peculiar and significant, in which our hu- 
man nature is seen as working potently because 
of the deep underworking of a divine force com- 
ing forth from God? 

Standing in the presence of this remarkable 
experience, when man is nearest his normal con- 
dition, and the usual hindrances to his best activ- 
ities are removed, have we not found him where 
we can get the best answers to certain questions 
often asked ? He is nearer God in such moods, 
and he is most trustworthy in his religious con- 
sciousness. What his experience involves at such 
times about God ; what it says, if it says anything, 
about direct contact with him ; what it says about 
the soul as a reality, as endowed with peculiar 
powers, in these exercises when it best knows 
itself; what it perceives in the character of the 
Bible in these hours of best moral vision as it be- 
takes itself, with a sort of divine instinct, to that 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 15 

book ; what higher views this experience involves 
of righteousness, and what intenser abhorrence of 
all manner of unrighteousness; what new em- 
phasis it puts on the eternal distinction between 
right and wrong, and of the souPs solemn obliga- 
tions in view of the eternal results of each of them ; 
what of prophecy is involved in the conversion of 
the soul as to the eternal development of the 
germ then and there implanted, — all these are 
questions best put and best answered, not before 
the ordinary religious feeling of all men, but in 
the presence of the special religious consciousness 
of those who can substantiate their claim to a 
genuine Christian experience. 

True it is, that for some earnest souls, intent 
upon solving the question of personal salvation, 
these inquiries are laid aside for the time. It is 
for them to obtain a knowledge of what true 
religion really is, before studying any problems 
which may better be considered after they have 
gained that experimental knowledge. A good 
many persons desire that, if they are to do any- 



16 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

thing about religion, they may secure a deep and 
permanent experience in it. They see men who 
have made failures. There are those who hes- 
itate to begin, afraid that they shall not succeed ; 
and some who have really begun are always trem- 
bling for the result, fearing that their religious 
experience will be transient — that it will be only 
a temporary graft attached by the gardener's wax 
and rag, and not the true life that comes out of 
the true Vine. Naturally cautious, some are un- 
willing to enter the Christian course until they 
have counted the cost. They see what it means 
for one to be a Christian. They are certain that 
storms sweep the moral ocean, and they would not 
embark in any unsea worthy craft. They want a 
religion, if they are to have any, that is good in 
winter and good in summer; fit to live by and to 
die by ; that men will respect and God approve ; 
that shall not be transient as time, but lasting as 
eternity. They see that no man may come back 
to mend the doings of the present state. The 
solemn issues of bliss or woe are bound up with 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 17 

the right or the wrong choices of this mortal life. 
They must risk the soul, their whole capital in 
existence, upon this venture, and they want, if 
any, a genuine and profound experience of re- 
ligion. 

Many, too, are driven to desire an experimental 
knowledge of religion for themselves by witness- 
ing the shipwrecks that some have made who 
started well. They set sail with all confidence. 
They left the port with many congratulations 
upon the deck, beneath the flag that waved so 
proudly over them. There is now, after a few 
months have gone by, only a stranded hulk to 
show for all that early promise. And, seeing 
such instances, some are afraid of shallowness in 
experience. They shrink from taking a position 
which they may fail to maintain. They appre- 
ciate the Christian character. Religion is too 
pure in itself to be blotted by any conspicuous 
failure that they might make, and both for the 
sake of religion and of their own reputation they 
desire that if they make any beginning, they may 

2* B 



18 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

attain unto the deepest and richest and most fruit- 
ful experience which it is possible to find on earth. 
And are there not, also, men whose experience 
in religion has been arrested midway — who truly 
began, and who have not really turned back, but 
who creep when they should run, are babes when 
they should be full-grown men ? They know the 
dissatisfactions of a feeble religious life rather than 
the full satisfactions of a soul that has drunk deep 
draughts from the river of God. Such souls are 
seized at times with a divine longing. They want 
an experience that stands not in their own will, 
but in God's will, working through their natural 
pow r er of willing — an experience that founds itself 
less upon their own shrewdness and force of cha- 
racter and individual determination, and more 
upon the fact — if indeed it be a fact — that the 
currents of God's grace may flow through the 
soul. They want a faith that is more than a 
barely human grasp of God's promise, and a pray- 
er that is more than a human cry of distress. And 
so they desire an experience that shall be a God- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 19 

given thing, and they long for a prayer that is 
" the breath of God in man, returning whence it 
came." If it be true that all religion begins in 
God's heart and heaven, sweeps as a divine circle, 
down from the skies, runs through all holy souls, 
and then curves upward until the perfect circle 
meets again in God, then to have this peculiar 
experience in one's soul must be most desirable ; 
and men, dreading the shallowness of much which 
passes for piety, will crave this form of it as that 
which alone is deep and enduring, because its be- 
ginning and ending are in the roots of the nature 
of God himself. The acute and thoughtful Bengel, 
offering comment upon Paul's words, "the life of 
God," declares: "Spiritual life in believers is 
kindled from the life itself of God." If this be 
.so, then the higher Christian life craved by so 
many in our churches to-day can receive only a 
transient — not to say an abnormal and mistaken 
— advance from the ecstatic experiences which 
some desire so earnestly. What* if the best expe- 
rience comes in another way and is measured by 



20 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

another standard? What if it has depths and 
heights, as it relates to God's truths, which know 
no bounds of earth or of heaven ? If in its nature 
it is eternally progressive, it offers a department 
of inquiry which has the greatest interest and in- 
struction. If men have been fascinated by the 
study of the lowest forms of the animal world ; 
if, rising higher, others have been keenly inter- 
ested in the study of the human body, and some 
in the discussion of the phenomena of the human 
mind, — how much more of interest and fascination 
must there be in the study of the facts which are 
brought into view, if there shall be found evidence 
that the Divine Spirit and the human soul do act- 
ually come together, the one to give, the other to 
receive, the stamp of a new spiritual life! The 
world has applauded the saying, " The proper 
study of mankind is man ;" but, surely, if it be 
possible that man can be touched, roused, regen- 
erated, sanctified by a supernatural, and even a 
divine, agent or agency, then in the process he is 
in possession of an experience in which he is an 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 21 

object of eager and peculiar interest. If noticed 
so carefully of God, he may well be noticed by 
us. 

Nor are we simply spectators who watch the 
phenomena. For if there is a true Christian ex- 
perience, in which stands a man's fitness for heav- 
en, then we must examine ourselves, and deter- 
mine the question of its genuineness, its purity, 
and the degree of its advancement in our souls. 
So that all studies of self and of others who have 
begun in the Christian life are studies in the high- 
est forms of philosophy. It may be that this ex- 
perience is the " wisdom " into which Paul claims 
that genuine believers are inducted, just as, by rite 
and ceremony, the learned in the olden times were 
initiated into certain fraternities — a peculiar honor 
to which only a select few could aspire. What 
if there is a spiritual wisdom gained only by 
this peculiar Christian experience? What if it 
grounds itself on that moral nature, the deep- 
est thing in every man? What if, unlike the 
confraternities of the olden time, into which only 



22 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

those who possessed a certain intellectual training 
and culture could enter, the great company of 
those who possess the secret of spiritual knowledge 
has in it men from all grades of society ? For if 
this experience is a preparation for the future life, 
and a prophecy of it, we have cause of rejoicing 
that none are excepted from the promise of heaven 
save those who except themselves. 

The problem of Christian experience is, then, 
a very different one for different persons. Some 
will ask as to the reality of it ; some as to the 
righteousness of it in its outcome; some as to 
what it involves of objective facts, of it as inclu- 
ding a sphere of moral things outside the soul, 
which are just as real things as are granite hills 
and rolling oceans in the sphere of the material 
world. There are others, who dimly understand 
that this matter of Christian experience involves 
the truth of certain things in religious philosophy 
and doctrine, and who want to see these inferences 
drawn out in careful statement. And there are 
also those whose deep practical interest in the re- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 23 

ligious life leads them to desire a knowledge of 
the tests of a genuine experience, and a broader 
comprehension of what it warrants us to expeci 
in the world beyond. 



CHAPTER II. 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AS A REALITY. 

In the religious language of the times certain 
phrases have come to be used to describe the pe- 
culiar phenomena which belong to the beginning 
and the progress of vital and personal piety. The 
churches demand of those who come to make the 
Christian profession that they have what is pop- 
ularly called " an experience of religion." And 
the earlier struggles of the soul with worldly feel- 
ing and sinful passion, its revulsion at its former 
unbelief and sin, and also its subsequent sense of 
the divine forgiveness and renovation, its loftier 
aims, its conscious victory over self, its serene 
trust, and its new outlook of Christian hope, — all 
this is properly called a religious experience. 

And this phrase is also employed to express the 
natural development of what is claimed to be a 

24 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 25 

new spiritual life. So that, in the broadest sense 
of. the term, the Christian experience includes the 
whole interior world of hope and fear and aspira- 
tion; of struggle, trial, and conquest; of progress 
in righteousness and of advancement in spiritual 
knowledge — the whole result of a judgment that 
becomes daily riper, of a vision that is clearer, 
and a heart that is purer. It is the beginning, 
the progress, and the consummation of experi- 
mental religion. It is that whole vast store of 
moral material gained by the soul as it employs 
itself in the realm of Christian feeling, exercise, 
and duty. 

The existence of this and of similar phrases 
among devout men is a proof of their fitness. For 
if, as men, one after the other, became spiritual 
Christians, they found that religion was not an 
experience, but only an intellectual reception of 
certain facts, or was but the careful practice of cer- 
tain duties, this phrase would long ago have been 
discarded as false and misleading. But when un- 
told millions of Christian men and women, of all 



26 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

grades of culture and through all the Christian 
centuries, agree in employing language which de- 
clares their inner life to be a profound experience, 
when their deepest convictions demand words no 
less expressive, we accept this mode of speech, use 
it freely, and find in this demand and usage a 
presumption, if not a direct proof, that Christian 
experience is a reality. 

The word "experience" denotes a direct and 
personal knowledge. You may read of fire, of its 
peculiar qualities. You may not doubt that it 
will burn. But touch a nerve of your body with 
a live coal, and you have found out what fire is 
by experience. You may have read of frost, of 
its fanciful work on the morning's window-pane, 
of its marvellous work as it has rent mountains 
asunder; but when some keen blast blows direct 
from the pole, and you are exposed to its piercing 
wrath, you know then by experience what cold is. 
And likewise there are mental experiences of per- 
plexity and uncertainty, and moral experiences of 
anguish or of joy, of despair or of hope, that are 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 27 

realities. When a mother finds a cradle emptied 
and a grave filled there is an experience — an ex- 
perience that for long days shall darken all things 
about her ; for this world is another world when 
seen through a mourning veil. There is no other 
such lens as a tear. Surely none can doubt the 
actual experiences of sorrow, for it is sometimes a 
terrible reality. And yet none the less real is the 
other pole of human experience — that of joy. 
When it comes into the soul even the pulses of 
the body respond. The heart beats with a quick- 
ened throb, the eye kindles to a new light, and all 
the world is spanned by the rainbow arch thrown 
over it by the gladness within. And this, too, is 
an experience. Now, exactly as fire tends to burn, 
and frost to freeze, and death in the household to 
open the fountain of tears, so in the moral realm 
there are certain facts that tend to produce an ex- 
perience of religion. That is their natural result. 
Really accepted, they must work in some way 
upon the human soul. They will certainly stir 
the " me within us." No matter now as to the 



28 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

character of the emotion they create; no matter, 
at this point, whether they irritate or soothe, 
awake opposition or bring delight, — the fact now 
and here claimed is that these causes must produce 
an effect, and that some sort of an experience 
must always result from the presence of these 
truths in a man's soul. 

And now another element comes into view. Let 
this experience, which is sure to be the result when 
the facts are believed, be an experience that mani- 
festly "makes for righteousness" — a change in 
the character for the better ; a change that leads 
a man to break with old courses of acknowledged 
wrong, to adopt new and loftier aims, and to select 
higher standards of conduct; let there be an up- 
lifting of all the moral nature in him, so that right 
and wrong are no more general names, but posi- 
tive convictions ; let the man stand obviously on 
higher ground and breathe a purer air ; let him be 
swayed most evidently by better impulses than 
before, and not only undertake, but actually 
achieve, moral victories over his lower nature, — 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 29 

and there is at least a presumption— some would 
even say a strong evidence — that the things which 
tend to produce these results are not falsehoods, 
but truths. So that here w r e are in the presence, 
not of delusions, but of realities — of realities that 
have a name and a character, and are the real 
effects of real causes. We are here in no dream- 
land, but we are amid actual facts ; we are touch- 
ing things that have shape and substance and cha- 
racter; we are in no realm of fancy, but amid the 
most real of all realities. 

Nor are the factors to this result all named until 
we seek one more cause of them. There must be 
a reason why things which are believed to be true, 
and which tend to make men better, are often in- 
operative up to a given line of experience, and then 
become singularly potent. There are times when 
things which should sway a man's soul do not do 
it. They may disturb and irritate when they 
move in any way. Afterward, for some reason, 
they are made to be potent for good. If the ex- 
perience be found to be, at a certain time, singu- 

3* 



30 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

larly intense, if it have a potency far beyond its 
natural result, though along the same direction, 
there must be a further cause in some agent or 
agency. And it must be an agency for good, a 
holy influence, for the work bears not an evil 
stamp. That which tends to the right has the 
signature of the true. We are in the presence of a 
spiritual force that not only acts along a line, but 
secures a degree of potency which the mere facts 
themselves would fail of producing. For they did 
not previously produce that result which they are 
adapted to secure. They did not do their work 
until there was imparted to them a very singular 
efficiency. So that there is, to say the very least, 
a presumption that the explanation of the Scrip- 
ture is true which finds here a spiritual change 
wrought by the Holy Spirit. At any rate, we are 
among substantial things, and we are working in 
a realm the most intensely real when we consider, 
as w r e are doing, these movements of human souls 
in their deepest convictions. For all this involves 
facts about God and truth and duty — involves a 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 31 

whole world of interests that the soul does not 
make, but finds made for it, and into which it is 
ushered, and where it must do its great work. 

There are open to us two courses of argument. 
We can cite the biblical facts and doctrines, can 
show that there are promises of a deep and rich 
experience in righteousness when these are believed, 
and we can then summon the witness to show that 
the promised result in righteousness has been ex- 
actly accomplished ; and that, therefore, the Bible 
is so far truthful. Or, again, it is possible to 
come directly to this Christian experience, to show 
its reality, and then, on this basis, to ask what of 
truth and doctrine is necessarily involved in it, 
and to ascertain how far it confirms the peculiar 
facts and doctrines of the Bible. In this case we 
may not cite its words as proof-texts, but we are 
still at liberty to employ them as convenient and 
happy forms of expression which are well known 
to the world, and are in constant use among Chris- 
tian people. 

Let us take the latter course, and cite at once 



32 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

the facts of the great Christian consciousness of 
devout souls. 

There come to men peculiar occasions when by- 
some means the moral nature * in them is greatly 
roused. They are willing to be fair-minded and 
honest-hearted ; to take up, with no evasion, the 
matter of personal religion; to drop the philoso- 
pher and become the inquirer ; to cease from the 
controversial and to commence with the practical 
methods of religious investigation. Let a man 
come to take up and bring into his soul any one 
of our moral truths — say, for instance, that of im- 
mortality. It is now no more a merely curious 
fact, but one that comes home to him, that he him- 
self, and by himself, and no other for him, must 
live for ever ; that he has capacity for infinite joy ; 

* The existence of a moral as well as an intellectual nature 
we assume in this discussion. Cousin says : " The existence 
of a spiritual soul, of the distinction between good and evil, 
of duty and equity, of liberty and the responsibility of actions, 
of an eternal justice and a divine Providence, — all these grand 
beliefs common sense has revealed, more or less imperfectly, 
from the first day to all men." 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 33 

and that this same capacity for infinite joy is just 
as great for infinite woe. Let the fact be borne 
in upon his soul, and take possession of it, that he 
is here for a brief period, and that his reception 
or his rejection of the provisions of the gospel 
will determine whether he will be an inheritor of 
the one or the other of these two immortal states — 
and he will be stirred in every fibre of his being. 
Let this man see that he has made no fit prepara- 
tion for that immortality ; let the burden of a 
wrong life, the result of a wrong heart, be upon 
him ; let there be the sense of the sin of neglect- 
ing his God, and of the baseness of an ingratitude 
such as he never exhibits toward his fellow-man ; 
let him see that we men are not simply unfortu- 
nates to be pitied, but sinners who ought to be 
punished ; let there come to him the conviction 
that the condemnation of him in God's mind must 
be more severe than that in his own, — and his con- 
science will rise up and take part with God against 
himself. Let this be felt just as death is felt in 
the family, and you have an experience that goes 



34 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

to the very depths of one's deepest nature. The 
facts are moving, and they move him. They are 
arrows, and they wound. They are earthquake 
forces, and they split the crust of the soul's in- 
difference. That is just their natural and ex- 
pected result. When the vessel grazes the outer 
rock of the reef and the shiver goes through all 
her timbers, the mariner springs from his couch : 
he leaves the dreams of the night to meet the facts 
of a threatened death, and to make his alarm the 
means, if possible, of his salvation. So God lets 
condemning truth come home to men, in order to 
startle them out of their worldly dream into more 
serious views of life and immortality. What if, 
at the time when best able to appreciate the rescue, 
this man, alive to the possibility of some deliver- 
ance, shall get his eye upon certain old, world- 
worn facts, that had once only an historic value 
for him? What if he sees the signs of a moral 
meaning in them, and the conviction grows upon 
him that if these are really moral facts which 
have taken outward and historic form, they are 



'. THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 35 

exactly what will meet his case? What if Christ's 
death is both a moral and an historic fact, which 
he himself needs to take up and appropriate as the 
fact bringing the very deliverance required by one 
exposed to moral wreck and ruin ? And this one, 
only, last, and sufficient deliverance, he actually 
accepts and employs for himself. It was, pre- 
viously, truth received with a mere assent ; at most 
it was some other man's truth. It is his own and 
appropriated truth now. It is real to his own life, 
just as would be a child's birth in his house- 
hold. It is an experience. On a wreck out at 
sea, as the leak gains and the pumps are aban- 
doned, and there is no deliverance from the com- 
ing doom, the men may discuss the theory of a 
lifeboat, recall the way in which it is built and 
the principle on which it could float its burden ; 
but let an actual lifeboat appear on the edge of 
some distant breaker, let her come near, and let 
these men leap from the wreck into the boat and 
be borne to the shore and stand once more on the 
firm earth, — and it is all another thing. They 



36 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

have had experience of salvation by the lifeboat. 
Jesus Christ, that personage who once came into 
human history, and who laid claim to have been 
sent to save the lost, exactly meets the wants in 
such moments of moral disaster. And men in 
such positions of extremity do not stand upon any 
questions about the boat that rescues them, or 
whence she came. Those things can be discussed 
afterward. To be saved is the first want of those 
who are wrecked. Christianity is the only system 
of religion on earth that provides a Saviour, and 
so the only one that sees our first want and under- 
takes to meet it. Fitness becomes swift proof of 
truthfulness. And as one leaps, in a hearty faith, 
from the sinking wreck to the saving boat, he gets 
in the act an experience of salvation. 

And now it is found that this man is awake to 
a deeper class of phenomena. There is frequently 
a consciousness of something at work down among 
one's tastes and preferences. The soul is moved 
upon in new ways. The most general truths of 
even natural religion had been annoying and re- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 37 

pulsive. They were allowed no fair action upon 
the soul. Some change has occurred that was not 
altogether self-caused, so that all moral ideas have 
new force. It was more than his own volition 
that made him act so like another man. A power 
that tends toward righteousness has been at work 
in a mysterious way upon some part of him lower 
down than his own choice, and has worked in him 
"to will and to do" in new directions. Suppose 
we call that power — for we must have some name 
for it — the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us as- 
sume that there is such a Spirit, reserving until 
further on the proof and verification of that fact, 
and only now giving that name to this force that 
makes for righteousness so powerfully in some 
human souls. They find all the moral truths 
which they own, and all religious facts which they 
know, are borne in upon them and are acting in 
them with a new efficiency. This mysterious 
agency, which we agree now to call the Spirit, 
sheds such light that these things are seen, hot 
dimly, as in the mists of the morning, but they 



38 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

come out sharply as in the meridian sunlight. 
They are no more obscure. They stand up, as 
stands some vast mountain, so directly in one's way 
that there is no possibility of missing the fact that 
there it stands. And when the holy presence be- 
comes greater, and the Spirit presents our duty of 
choice between the right w T ay and the wrong way, 
shows us the strait gate and the wide gate, brings 
before us the self-denials of righteousness and the 
hollow pleasures of the world; and, more than 
that, inclines one to choose the better part; when 
the soul is bowed in penitence, and is lifted in 
faith under a singular and holy constraint to which 
one gladly surrenders ; when there is a conscious- 
ness of a divinely-given freedom from an old and 
terrible bondage, so that now one is able to lay 
hold, with the firmest grasp, of a promise once 
thought to be unsubstantial, but now seen to be 
God's sure declaration, — this is an experience. 
Paul's consciousness, and that to which his breth- 
ren testified, is given in these words : " And you 
hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 39 

and sins; wherein in time past ye walked accord- 
ing to the course of this world, according to the 
prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now 
worketh in the children of disobedience : among 
whom also we all had our conversation in times 
past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires 
of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature 
the children of wrath, even as others. But God, 
who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith 
he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath 
quickened us together with Christ (by grace ye 
are saved) ; and hath raised us up together, and 
made us to sit together in heavenly places in 
Christ Jesus." * 

Sometimes a truth long " bed-ridden and dor- 
mant in the soul/' an old familiar truth of natural 

* It hardly needs to be said that these words of Paul are 
not here quoted as a PROOF-fTEXT. They are, however, legit- 
imate material, in this part of the argument, as the utterance 
of Paul's own religious consciousness and that of the Christians 
of his day ; and as such may be as freely quoted as Augustine's 
Confessions, Luther's Letters, Wesley's Journal, or Bunyan's 
Autobiography. 



40 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

religion, has been endued with new power. Some- 
times those principles which in themselves are 
neither virtuous nor vicious, but simply natural, 
have been made singularly efficacious. That nat- 
ural and universal desire in men which philoso- 
phers call " the love of possession " has led a man 
who had been mainly a worldly man, and seldom 
moved in any direction by religious motives, to 
erect a dwelling with much of thought and care 
and cost. It has flashed across his mind while 
busy about the details of his earthly mansion that 
he must some day go out of it, and that he will 
need a home in heaven. He has been doing so 
much for the one, and he has been doing nothing 
about the other ! What folly his course, even to 
himself! The thought haunts and worries him. 
It is only reasonable that it should do so. For, 
over beyond, where he must spend the largest part 
of his being, he has no dwelling prepared. The 
thought is with him day and night. It begins to 
color all his life, darkening every bright thing 
with the conviction that he must leave it, and that 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 41 

he has no heavenly home. He hears the song 
from the assembly of Christians, " Oh, think of a 
home over there !" and it is not music, but agony, 
to his ear and his heart. Life seems a mockery 
if there is nothing for him beyond. He has de- 
layed long enough. This thing demands atten- 
tion. He resolves that he will face the subject 
squarely, and do what must be done. Led on- 
ward, he finds forgiveness and grace, and comes 
in under that great promise which he finds in his 
Bible, " In my Father's house are many mansions ; 
I go to prepare a place for you/' All the teach- 
ings of childhood, all texts of Scripture learned 
years before, and the thousand Christian influences 
of his life, had prepared the way. At the right 
moment God sent the familiar truth of a " home 
needed beyond." It became a living truth. It 
took hold with a more than human grasp. Adapt- 
ed in itself to induce serious thought, it has been 
made to do a work much deeper than it would 
ever have done of itself, and an actual regene- 
ration was the result. If, on the one hand, it be 



42 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

said that it is only natural for a reasonable being 
to act upon such a conviction, it may be asked, on 
the other hand, Why did the man then so act, and 
why was the act a change of the whole nature, 
and of such thoroughness as to control the whole 
life for subsequent years ? * 

In further proof that religion is an experience, 
consider that religion in its substance must be an 
interior life. It shows how superficial we are get- 
ting to be, that the word " life," in our popular 
religious speech, is so often used about conduct, 
about the outward manifestations of the thing 
itself. But this is by no means the scriptural 
usage. In the Bible, the life is usually the inward 
spring, the hidden source, of the outward act. It 
is not what men see, but the cause of what men 

, * The outline sketched above is taken from the experience 
of a leading business-man of singularly upright character, as 
he related it to the church of which he desired to become a 
member. It is by no means singular, save in the fact that a 
very familiar truth was made potent for such a result. But 
even in this respect the experience is matched by thousands 
of instances in our churches. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 43 

see. And the Old English usage is like that of 
the Scriptures in this respect. And even in our 
modern speech, except in the region of morals and 
religion, we retain the deeper and richer meaning. 
When we talk of the life of a tree we do not 
mean its trunk or its boughs; still less do we refer 
to the way in which its leaves bend and toss them- 
selves in the breezes. We mean that interior some- 
thing which makes a tree differ from a stone, and 
this particular tree to differ not only from other 
kinds of trees, but from every other tree of the 
same kind. When we talk of the life of the tree 
we do not mean to speak of what the tree does, 
but of that unseen cause which makes it what it 
is. In the human body the life is not the hands 
or the feet, not even the heart or the lungs, but 
that interior something which uses them as they 
were made to be used. The dead tree does not do 
the work of a tree. It stands as a fact, but it is 
dead as a power. The hidden force that we call 
life is gone out of it. Meanwhile its neighbor 
tree, because it has the mysterious power of life 



44 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

in it, is using sunshine and rain, is sending down 
its roots, that with a fine instinct select the particles 
of the soil which it can best appropriate, and it is 
sending up and out on every side the fresh green 
twig and leaf, and by and by will come the fruitage. 
It is doing what it was made to do. And the life 
is that which secures in an organism the doing of 
what it was made to do. To life, the tree can only 
oppose death. But a human soul may be both 
dead to God and alive to sin. The moral ma- 
chinery may work backward. There may, as op- 
posed to true spiritual life, be a false and unspirit- 
ual life. There may be the " old man," which as 
to right activity is dead, and as to wrong activity 
is all too much alive. The " dead " man in one 
point of view is " alive " in the other. There is 
an experience in the old nature. The Bible has 
many a book of godly experience, but it has also its 
book of worldly feeling and logic and experience — 
the Ecclesiastes. It depicts the outcome of that 
old nature with which, unfortunately, we were all 
born, and which, by voluntary endorsement, we 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 45 

have made our own nature and our own guilt. 
And our argument is. here and now, that this old 
nature does not yield to the new nature, except 
through an experience of such a kind and inten- 
sity that there is no exaggeration in the most 
earnest forms of speech that can be used to de- 
scribe it. 

For consider from what we are changed. Hu- 
man nature shows us the gravest symptoms of 
moral disease. Some theory of depravity every 
man must have — some way of accounting for the 
evil phenomena that meet us in the world without 
and in the world within. The Bible can afford 
to paint human nature in colors fearfully dark, 
because it can immediately oifer the brightest hues 
of hope, that shall completely blot out all black- 
ness from the canvas for every believer. The 
Bible can be allowed to declare a fall, since it 
offers a restoration — to tell of a sickness that is 
fatal in itself, because it can bring an infallible 
cure. It declares sin to be no natural tenant, but 
a usurper, whom it proposes to turn out of God's 



46 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

palace in the human soul. But its whole method 
is that of facing squarely the facts. The disease 
never cures itself; it is an old nature, which it 
says is "corrupt according to the deceitful lusts/' 
or, as in a more accurate rendering, " is growing 
rotten in the lusts of deceit." The *■ old man " * 
is just that human nature which we all possess 
apart from* the peculiar working in us of the 
Divine Spirit. It is our "carnal" self; using 
now the word "carnal," not in its modern and 
restricted meaning of sensual, but in its broad 
Pauline sense, in which it denotes anything less 
or lower than a regenerated nature. In the old 
nature we are under the dominion of unregulated 
desires. Conscience and reason, kingly faculties, 
are in the prison under the throne on which sit 

* If the nature of the argument in this and the following 
chapter forbids the quotation of these words of Paul as an 
inspired proof-text, it allows us to use them as convenient 
phrases, originating with Paul, but now a part of the house- 
hold language of the christain world in which the religious 
consciousness expresses itself. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 47 

the worldly preferences and depraved passions of 
the soul. Revolution has put the slave in the 
palace and the master in the house of bondage. 
And there must be a counter-revolution to rein- 
state the soul's true Master. It is not even a state 
of anarchy, in which nothing permanently rules, 
and in which anything may rule for the hour. 
In that case godliness might have now and then 
a chance. But it is the kingship of evil, the rule 
of the old unregenerate nature, tyrannizing over 
the whole man, and silencing, as far as possible, 
the remonstrances of our higher faculties. And 
this rule is through the " lust of deceit" 

There are diseases threatening the real life of 
this soul — as there are those threatening the life 
of the body — the peculiarity of which is their 
deceitfulness. In one of these scourges of our 
New England climate, it is always noticed that 
the spirits do not sink, the color does not leave 
the cheek ; it is the rather heightened. The poor 
victim of consumption does not understand that 
he is failing, and while he talks of what he will 



48 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

do the next day or the next week, friends turn 
aside to hide the tear, knowing that he will never 
again leave his room until carried out for the last 
sad journey. The old nature in us works like 
that. Its very method is that of deceit. " Nothing 
is the matter. Why all this anxiety about relig- 
ion ? Why these frantic efforts ? The base may 
need it, but I do not." Who has not heard this 
plea of a soul that is deceived as to its whole 
spiritual condition ? So I have known a man de- 
ceived by his appetite for strong drink. He had 
no solicitude, though every friend believed him 
in the greatest danger. He had no doubt but 
that he could easily leave off drinking when- 
ever he should choose. Sin's delusion was on 
him ; " the lust of deceit " was even then his 
master. 

In depicting this deceit, which puts men under 
its charm, Christian experience has very generally 
employed the figure of sleep. We all know that 
sleep may be untroubled while fearful dangers 
are close at hand. Matters of the greatest import- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 49 

ance to himself may be transpiring directly about 
the sleeper, and he may not know of them. 
All about him men are keenly alive to the real 
facts of the situation, but he is as unconscious as 
though he were dead. For sleep is death's sister; 
and, in this matter of unconsciousness, they are 
singularly alike. A mariner may sleep quietly 
in his hammock, the smile of some deluding 
vision on his face, the murmured words of glad- 
ness on his lips, while the features of every man 
about him are tortured with fear or blanched with 
terror. And, as dreams seem sometimes to trench 
on the realities of waking hours, seizing on actual 
things, but strangely distorting and discoloring 
them, so the poor sleeper may imagine that the 
dark wings of the angel of death about to enfold 
him are the white pinions of some blessed spirit 
fresh from paradise. And the waking of such 
a soul is an experience never to be forgotten. 
" Where have I been, and what doing, never to 
have seen these things before? I have lived in 
a dream, and just begin to see things as they are," 



50 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

cries many a man when the touch and truth of 
God rouse him to the realities of a true life. 

The experience of some men is of a lower depth 
in insensibility than that denoted by sleep. They 
want that solemn word death with which to de- 
scribe their former moral state. The ethical na- 
ture, the eternal conscience, and eternal reason, 
though rendered partially torpid by the icy numb- 
ness of the rest of the man, never are quite stilled. 
By the eye of this ethical nature a man may look 
down into the frozen sea of his voluntary nature, 
and see clearly the living death within him. The 
Arctic navigator was himself benumbed, but not 
so far that his eye refused to look on the moun- 
tains and plains of ice on every side of his ship. 
The conscience can see death in the affections and 
the reason — see death in the will toward the things 
of God's kingdom. To this ethical side of the 
soul there comes the appeal of eternal truth. And 
there are moments when this spiritual vision is 
sharp— when the deadest soul, through the part that 
lives eternally, sees and feels, in some measure, 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 51 

its moral deadness. It may cry out with a sort 
of automatic despair — 

" The rocks can rend, the earth can quake, 
And all the depths of Nature shake; 
Of feeling all things give some sign, 
Save this unfeeling heart of mine." 

And some men come out of this state by this very 
alarm about it. Men get to be afraid that this 
spiritual death will deepen and darken into eter- 
nal death. When, on alpine summits, a traveller, 
sadly benumbed with the cold, is tempted to think 
that, if he could only lie down and rest for one 
brief hour, he could then go on again, his watchful 
guides, aware that sleep is fatal, warn him to re- 
sist the spell. If he is still inclined to yield, they 
redouble their cry. They assure him that once 
soundly sleeping he will never wake again. If 
the fatal drowsiness is already upon him, they 
shout, they use force, they compel him to go on, 
lest he should yield to the delusion and sleep, on 
those inhospitable snows, his death-sleep. There 



52 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

are men whose experience is like that. They are 
roused by no gentle methods, but by the harsh 
touch that is intent on waking the soul from its 
death of icy unconcern. There are souls that 
have come up with horror out of the pit — whose 
conversion seems to them more like life from the 
dead than like anything else. And neither time 
nor eternity can obliterate the memory of the ex- 
perience they knew when life came in and death 
went out the gateway of the soul. 

Nor was it experience of deliverance from spir- 
itual sleep with its delusions, and spiritual death 
with dark threatening of eternal dominion, alone; 
but some have had experience of virulent evil. 
It was worse than deadness to the good ; it was 
the intense life of a wicked soul. Death God- 
ward is perfectly consistent with life toward all 
that is the opposite of God and his gospel. Even 
the animal impulses — lowest of all the forces, and 
of use only under bit and curb — are allowed in 
some men to handle the reins. Such passions 
may have, indeed, their place in making a sue- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 53 

cessful voyage ; but it is down below, under the 
hatchways, and not upon the bridge as the nav- 
igators of the ship. They are the steam, and not 
the rudder. The immense evil that comes from 
any other way of using the animal impulses is a 
thing too evident for any to mistake. If a man 
does not rule them in righteousness, they will rule 
him in the tyranny of a terrible unrighteousness. 

But there are other lusts than those for fooa, 
for drink, and for the gratification of bodily de- 
sires. The whole mass of w T orldly passions are 
most unscrupulous tyrants. Worldliness holds 
that man of respectable life in just as firm a grasp 
as does drink the drunkard, or play the gambler. 
He is as really enslaved as they. To give up the 
good opinion of those in " one's set ;" to yield the 
cherished ambitions of one's life ; to break with 
the world ; to confess one's self entirely in the 
wrong; to give up the arguments of years as 
worthless and the excuses of a lifetime as vain ; 
to own one's self a sinner; and to break away 
from all one's former life, — this is a struggle as 

5 * 



54 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

great to many a worldly man as any required of 
the inebriate or the sensualist. For it is really a 
question of God's sovereignty or of some other; 
and as to what other, it is only a matter of more 
or less respectability. But any other sovereignty 
than that of God enlists on its side the passionate 
preferences of the soul. It is " the lust of deceit- 
ful desire." 

The intensity of this "lust" is seen in the fail- 
ure of thousands, in their efforts to break their 
bonds. They thought it simply a matter of 
choice, and they attempted to make the right 
choice against these natural preferences ; and they 
have failed every time. They could not get the 
will to take the stand against the nature ; or if it 
made an hour's effort at the unnatural task, the 
bent will sprang back again to its old place when 
the pressure was renewed. In the struggle to do 
this by sheer force of will, men have failed. All 
of us have tried it, and the daybook of life has 
the sad record of foiled resolutions and broken 
attempts. Down goes the resolve in some gale 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 55 

of passion, or perhaps it falls a neglected thing, 
perishing by sheer forgetfulness. Meanwhile 
"the lust of worldliness " gets stronger. The 
ripples on the shore increase to a tide rolling in 
with mighty waves. They sweep over our re- 
solves written on the sand, and disport them- 
selves gleefully, as if in mockery of the words 
w r e had traced. The drunkard, cursing the bottle 
to which he clings, is the type of any sinner when 
"the lust" of a worldly heart is roused by the 
glance of condemning truth. And the consum- 
ing power of these unregulated worldly desires 
is something very w 7 onderful and very terrible. 
They go for their direct gratification at any cost. 
They ask only to be let alone by any higher im- 
pulses. They pull down palace and prison, and, 
Samson-like, they pull them down upon them- 
selves. Describing not sensuality alone, but any 
wrong love that has become controlling, the 
apostle says : " When lust hath conceived, it 
bringeth forth sin ; and sin, when it is finished, 
bringeth forth death." And in the progress to- 



56 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

ward this result, it is just as true as we found 
it when examining the negative side of the sub- 
ject, that the tendency grows with a steady and 
deceitful growth. We saw how sleep crept on 
stealthily unto death, and present spiritual death 
grew deeper and darker into the eternal death. 
That was the approach to the pit by the slow and 
steady process of dying to goodness ; this ap- 
proaches the same result by going over the path 
in which natural and unregulated desires become 
stronger and fiercer with every year of life. And 
here, as there, on this positive as well as that 
negative side, all progress is not by " the' truth," 
but by "deceit." The law of moral progress 
makes us better or worse. The quality prevailing, 
be it conscience or evil passion, grows by that on 
which it feeds. Forms of sin are getting fixed ; 
there is more avarice, pride, self-opinion, self- 
assertion, worldliness, and reluctance to become 
submissive to God. For the progress downward 
is the easiest possible. To nothing else we get so 
easily accustomed as to the increasing burden of 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 57 

sin. The sand-grains are, separately, very light. 
Let yourself be loaded gradually with them, and 
they will crush you in the end ; but the load shall 
be laid upon you so gradually that your strength 
to throw off the burden is gone before you know 
it. For this growth of some other love, this "lust " 
instead of " the love of God," is deceitful alike 
in kind and degree. It sees no landmarks by 
which to note its progress. It is careless as to 
any standard of mensuration. It creeps on, par- 
ticle by particle, till the fruitful soil is covered by 
the desert sand. Standing a few years since on 
the Great Pyramid, and searching the southern 
horizon with the glass, there stretched itself out 
the vast plain, dotted for twenty miles with the 
points of the pyramids, which betokened the po- 
sition of the grandest cemetery of one of the 
grandest cities of the old Egyptian civilization. 
And just within sight were the more than half- 
buried ruins of the city itself. How vast the city 
for which a cemetery of twenty miles was the 
needful appendage! God said, centuries ago, of 



58 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

Egypt, "a cloud shall coyer her," and "I will 
lay thy cities waste." By and by, it was found 
that the " cloud " was her sands. They began to 
rise. They encroached on the fat soil of the Nile. 
They began their march for the city. No efforts 
could avail. Egypt's great capital, larger, it may 
be, than London, was slowly and surely entombed 
by the onward march of those desert sands. They 
entered her dwellings, and her people fled ; her 
palaces, and her nobles deserted her ; her tombs, 
and now, thirty feet below the surface, men open 
the ancient burial-halls of the dead. But there 
is another eminence given us in our religion ; and, 
standing on this moral elevation and looking upon 
the scene, the saddest of sights greets the eye, 
whether we look at the tragedy of the world's 
history, or at that in each human soul. The 
original good has been overspread, past all power 
of human recovery, by the steady march of the 
desolation that began to come in so long ago, and 
has not ceased to work increasing ruin. There sits 
the discrowned city amid the sands of the Lybian 



THE CHEISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 59 

desert, but too true a type of a soul overcome by 
the steady growth of the ungoverned desires. 

And when these facts of sin working deceitful- 
ly, and sin bringing forth death, and sin exceed- 
ing sinful, are made clear to a human soul, and 
one's impotence to push back these swelling tides 
and crowd off these moving sands is felt, there is 
an experience. The word of God finds witness 
in the convicted soul. " Men and brethren, what 
must we do ?" is the cry that is forced from the 
lips. Now there can be no more shallowness of 
experience. Self-help fades out. Sin is a nature, 
and that nature is guilt. The stream for cleansing 
is itself fouled; the helper needs himself to be 
helped ; the physician, to be cured. All the 
platitudes of common morality about reforming 
ourselves by choice of will, are insolent mock- 
ings. It is felt that the strength to leap down 
from the lofty castle is no strength to leap back 
again. And thus the soul gets a painful but 
needful experience of its loss, and of its impotence 
to regain its former position ; of its defilement, 



60 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

and of its impotence to cleanse its stains ; of its 
terrible progress in sin, and of its impotence to 
stay its onward march in evil ; of its deadness, 
and of its impotence to create in itself any true 
spiritual life. 

But let it not be supposed that all men are led 
to this knowledge of themselves before conversion, 
or even in the process itself. Frequently a con- 
version is very sudden, and occurs about a single 
truth. It is yet to be shown how little of truth 
a man may know, and yet be truly regenerated. 
But every conversion is the fitted stone of an 
arch, and from its shape and size you may deter- 
mine the shape of every other stone and the spring 
of the entire arch. Each truth is of a shape that 
compels all the rest to take on a definite form ; 
and each experience of religion, though gathering 
about a single doctrine, involves all the rest for 
those who can calculate the curve of which it is a 
segment. The whole of Christianity is involved, 
elementally, in each conversion. But only as one 
gets away far enough can he see how the structure 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 61 

will appear. A certain distance from conversion 
is needed as a perspective for a full view of all 
that it means. In conversion one has simply 
struck the first note of the song, and the subse- 
quent chords, as one goes through the music, are 
the most worthy of being called an " experience." 
It was some years after his conversion before 
Paul wrote so vividly about the " old man " and 
the " new man "—before he declared that " to be 
carnally-minded is death, and to be spiritually- 
minded is life and peace." It was out of the 
experiences of his mature Christian life that he 
said, " I see another law " — i. e. an evil princi- 
ple or tendency acting with the force of a law — 
" in my members, warring against the law of my 
mind." 

It is when one finds, a few months or years 
after his conversion, now this and now that old 
passion and power, w 7 hich he had thought dead 
rising up with their former imperiousness, that he 
is in danger of a mistaken judgment upon his 
spiritual state. But he is also certain that if the 



62 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

old remains, the new nature is also vigorous in him. 
And he gains some assurance that all is not lost ; 
and thus he comes to accept the Christian life as 
one of conflict, and then he is ready to gird him- 
self manfully for the holy war. When he is un- 
der the present temptation, he can see how ruin- 
ous sin would have been if allowed to remain an 
unchecked master — if it were now allowed to re- 
turn to its full sway over him. He sees the old 
precipices of evil down which one step more 
would have thrown him, in the old days of his 
impenitence, and he trembles at his narrow escape, 
and begins to fear that even now the old nature 
may damage, if not ruin, his soul. The possibil- 
ities of terrible fall, if God does not keep him, are 
seen and felt. He better judges of what he was 
when in his former state by the movements of that 
old nature, which, though dethroned, still rages in 
its bondage, and which, unless kept under, would 
still make him a castaway. But there is this to 
comfort a man under these revelations of his for- 
mer position — that now he has eyes to see the sin 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 63 

of it, and a heart to deplore it, and a divinely- 
given strength to resist it. 

In a certain asylum of the Old World they 
receive orphans of ten or twelve years, and retain 
them until they are given an education and a 
trade. Those who enter are usually boys from 
the street. They are first of all carried to the 
photograph-room, and in all their rags and filth, 
with unkempt hair and unwashed face, their pic- 
tures are carefully taken. They see that picture 
no more until their last day at the institution, 
when they enter once again the same room and 
another picture is made. Both are then put into 
their hands, and underneath the one, the words 
"What you were," and underneath the other, 
"What you are." Then, for the first time, the 
pupil can understand all that has been done for 
him. Were the order reversed, and it possible to 
know how the boy would look after ten years of 
study and industry, and at the outset the two pic- 
tures placed before him, but little could he appre- 
ciate it. But when gazing with trained and in- 



64 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

telligent eye upon them both, when standing on 
the vantage-ground where the institution has 
placed him, and looking as out of his present self 
upon his former self, he comprehends for the first 
time the old ignorance and degradation, from 
which he has been rescued for ever. Recalling 
the state of nature, as it appears to one standing 
in the new grace of the gospel, the apostle draws 
upon the Christian experience of his hearers w r hen 
he says, " Such were some of you ; but ye are 
washed, ye are sanctified." Millions of the race 
know that the experience of Christ's religion has 
made them better, purer, and nobler. And this 
was the result, not of any general influence which 
it had upon them as members of a Christian state, 
but it came only from a most implicit faith in 
Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour. 



CHAPTER III. 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AS A RENOVATION. 

The problem of the Christian experience is so 
vast that we may approach it from many sides. 

The architect is careful as to the foundations 
of his structure; the advocate wishes to get at 
the essential facts of the cause on trial; the 
chemist seeks his elementary substances; the 
philosopher, the primary and fundamental prin- 
ciples of our human nature. And in these in- 
quiries about religious experience we have sought 
proof of its reality down among the deepest 
workings of the human soul. If thus far the 
examination has been mainly along the line of 
facts which have to do with our self-condemnation, 
the reason is found in the form of our argument, 
in which we would establish the reality of a re- 
ligious experience upon the deepest needs of our 

6* E 65 



66 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

human nature. The glad fact of salvation rests 
for its possibility upon the sad fact of a previous 
condemnation. Disease is a fact primary to any 
cure. So, too, in order of time the old nature 
is before the new nature. The religious experi- 
ence as one enters the outer gate of repentance 
comes, in order of thought, before one enters the 
inner door of faith. Only let it be observed that 
all we now have to say about Christian experience 
as a renovation is really a cumulative argument 
as to the reality of that experience. But the ap- 
proach is from a new side, and the study is to be 
continued in a new light. 

It is certain that there are changes which do 
actually take place in men's character and conduct 
of a kind which are most vital and fundamental, 
and of which, apart from the explanation of them 
that is furnished by the religion of Christ, no man 
can give any rational account. They occur by the 
ten thousand. They are obviously changes from 
within. They appear to be not merely re-forma- 
tions — i. e. changes of the same substance into 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 67 

new forms — but to be re-generations — i. e. the 
bringing forth of a substantially new interior life, 
moved by new agencies. 

The swearer is seen, not only to leave off his 
oaths and to speak reverently of God, but to 
pray to him ; the man who had little conscience 
in anything becomes suddenly conscientious about 
the smallest matters; he who called it no one's 
business what he said becomes careful about every 
thought that it be not wrong, and has keenest 
care as to what God thinks of him, desiring to be 
pure and true and right when alone with his 
Maker. The young man leaves the billiard-table 
for the prayer-room, evidently because he loves 
the latter. Notorious for hating Christians, he 
loves them now, and they are his chosen com- 
panions, his trusted friends, his brethren in Jesus 
Christ. Things once indifferent are now full of a 
thrilling interest. Another class of objects take 
his interest and inspire his life. Nor is it one sex 
only who are thus reformed. She who was giddy 
has become sober-minded, and the change within 



68 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

imprints itself on the very features of the face. 
The thoughtless, flippant tongue ceases to use the 
dialect of folly, and in place of this, in consecrated 
tones, the true woman comes to speak sweetly and 
reverently of God, and sing, with a melody beyond 
what the lips alone could ever utter, the sacred 
songs of the religious life ; the old Bible is a new 
volume, and to it, as needle to pole, the heart 
turns in its love and its trust. 

And these changes, in both sexes and in all 
climes and nationalities, are, in the vast majority 
of cases, permanent as well as radical. Sorrow 
is met submissively, sickness borne with fortitude, 
and death itself encountered fearlessly. Nay, 
sometimes death is more remarkable and convin- 
cing than life. How have we seen a Christian 
soul, hovering over the border-ground for days 
and weeks, upborne by the inward experiences of 
religion ! Sometimes a woman naturally timid 
has been made supernaturally brave. Never more 
loving toward husband and children, never more 
desirous to live because her life was needed by her 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 69 

babes, she has looked through the cloud and seen 
a divine form, and heard a divine voice of Chris- 
tian promise, and has gone on bravely, saying, 
" Not my will, but thine be done." And at such 
a spectacle from reluctant lips has been pressed 
the involuntary prayer, " Let me die the death 
of the righteous, and my last end be like his !" 
Did any man ever know a sceptic who was not 
compelled to own that he had seen some one 
Christian? "My mother," said such a man — 
" my mother had a something that I know I have 
not, when she came to die. She was a Christian." 
But there are thousands of these mothers about 
whom the same has been said ; and fathers also, 
and children who died saying, "Jesus loves me, 
and I know I love him." Every man in a 
Christian land must have met facts like these. 
They are so frequent, they are made so often the 
theme of remark, they are found in such different 
strata of social life, that those persons are not 
without some reason for what they assert who 
declare, that there is no man in a Christian land 



70 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

who, down in his heart of hearts, fails to believe 
in the reality of experimental religion. 

But beyond the facts that are open to all men, 
and which furnish such a mass of evidence, there 
is another source of confirmation ; it is the testi- 
mony of Christians as to their own experience. 
To the facts which come under the observation of 
all, we are to add the personal witness of multi- 
tudes of fair-minded men, testifying to what they 
themselves by experience have come to know. 
They bear a certain testimony with which every 
man must deal in some way. These men say that 
they came to feel their folly and wrong and guilt. 
Their condition before a holy and just and mer- 
ciful God oppressed them. They turned by a sort 
of spiritual instinct to the Bible ; they also betook 
themselves to prayer. By these things — which 
are obviously the natural things for a human soul 
to do in its distress and want — they found the dis- 
tress at first increased. Perhaps they made the 
attempt to shut the Bible and omit the prayer. 
But there was a divine fascination in the word of 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 71 

God. They had to read and pray. And the mo- 
mentary revulsion opened their eyes to the lack 
of love and sympathy in their hearts toward their 
God. There was a plague-spot within. All this 
evil came welling up from a wrong heart. They 
saw that God must change their deepest feeling, 
or there was no hope and no heaven. It would 
take supernatural power to do the work which 
needed to be done. Hence their prayer. They 
found their guilt was a weakness, and their weak- 
ness was guilt. They seemed to live sin and 
breathe sin and to be sin. Their hearts, at first 
rebellious, at length were broken down before 
God. They testify also to another and subsequent 
class of feelings. There came experiences of joy 
and hope and peace. They felt in themselves a 
healing power, and saw a pardoning grace in Jesus 
Christ, in whom, with a sort of new naturalness, 
they believed almost because they could not help 
believing in such a Saviour. The separating cen- 
turies seem to them to disappear, and Jesus Christ 
becomes as real to the loving soul as though he 



72 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

were living on earth now. The moral nearness 
annihilates the historical distance, and Christ is 
" the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." 
God is no more the topmost stone of a logical 
pyramid, but the present, personal God in whom 
one lives, and to whom one comes in the holiest 
confidences of his inner life. 

This is their testimony. It means something. 
Let there be taken from it, in discount, all those 
cases in which men are deceived and are deceivers, 
all instances of mistake and hypocrisy, and still 
there remains an overwhelming mass of testimony 
of which no account can be given on any other 
theory than that of the reality of experimental 
religion. These things are facts. The sceptic is 
as much bound to account for them as is the 
Christian. But he cannot do it. There stand 
these witnesses, a very host, and they are giving in 
an amount of testimony such as was never offered 
before on any other subject that men have ever 
considered — an amount of evidence which, unless 
it be assumed that nothing can ever be proved by 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 73 

human testimony, is absolutely conclusive on this 
matter of an inward renewal as a thing of per- 
sonal experience. 

If, now, accepting the fact in its general form 
that a peculiar moral change occurs in the case of 
some of our race, we come closer to the phenom- 
ena, we may find a most interesting field of study 
in noting the widely different ways in which men 
enter upon this experience. 

To many persons there is a new sense of light 
and of vision. They see facts which are so new 
to them that it is as if, born blind, the old mir- 
acle of the Gospels had been done again upon 
their own eyes. 

There are multitudes of persons to whom, be- 
fore conversion, religion was a great and dim 
uncertainty. In a sceptical town a few miles 
from Boston, a minister of the gospel says that he 
has conversed with dozens of men who were brist- 
ling with objections to the Bible. He has adopt- 
ed one method with them all. "Are you certain" 
he says to them, " that this book is an imposture ? 



74 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

Are you certain about the position you take?" 
He has never found one who was certain. All 
of them were a little uncertain about their uncer- 
tainty. Their objections made them simply dis- 
satisfied. They have no foundation-facts on which 
to rest anything whatsoever. They gain nothing 
by their objections. They have nothing to show 
for a lifetime of such speculations. There can be 
no rest in any such belief, or rather semi-belief. 
For a faith that rests on negations and objections 
and confessed uncertainties, is cruelly disappoint- 
ing. A man not only makes nothing, but is in 
danger of losing everything ; for he sometimes gets 
frightened at the number of things that are un- 
settled for him. His whole mood of mind be- 
comes a doubt, and he fears that he may reach 
the negation of all thought and knowledge in 
coming to doubt if he doubts. When the sailor 
has been storm-tossed through the long and weary 
hours of a night that seems wellnigh endless, how 
his heart bounds as the mists lift, and just before 
his eyes, at the point where he most feared the 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 75 

dangerous rock, there shines out the light he had 
longed to see ! Then he knows where he is, and 
steers gladly for the port. And when a human 
soul has been tossed hither and yon on the bil- 
lows of doubt and uncertainty, and has heard the 
roar of the breakers on the reef, how glad one's 
whole being if at that instant there is One on 
whom to fix the eye, who can make the claim that 
he is " the Light of the world " ! The eye was 
made to see the light; the soul was made to rest 
in the Son of the Father. There ought to be 
such a Christ; and such a Christ the soul ought 
to see and trust. One feels that since we are 
made to believe rather than to doubt, there must 
be somebody to be believed. The roots of faith 
sometimes lie in the fact that we crave some one 
who can be perfectly trusted on these great ques- 
tions of religion. We want certainty, for we have 
much at stake — absolute security, for we must in- 
vest our all. Driven to look for this certainty to 
him, as our last resort, to find the light of truth in 
him or nowhere for us, we see, as we look toward 



76 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

the light, that it is no fickle glimmer j it is a star 
— nay, a sun. The need of some one to say to us, 
" I am the Light of the world," makes us ready 
to hear him say it. More and more we get to see 
how worthy he is of all confidence. We take him 
as Master, Teacher, Lord. 

But if we see light now, then we ought to have 
seen it before. For the light itself was as strong 
in our yesterday as in our to-day. " Sin lieth at 
our door" for not having believed, years ago, the 
testimony which God gave us about his Son 
Jesus Christ. We hear him teach the perfect 
law. We see him live the perfect life. It 
abashes us. In that light we see our darkness — 
in that purity, our defilement. What can he 
think of us? But by this light we are getting 
prepared for knowing him in a closer relation 
than as the Great Teacher. He discloses himself 
to us as the great Saviour, the first moment that 
we can bear the revelation. It is probably the 
natural impulse of every human heart to get one's 
self in some way worthy to come to God for for- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 77 

giveness. We wanted to wait until convicted 
enough, but we saw at length that no sorrow, of 
whatever kind or degree, could ever be a propi- 
tiation for sin. We wanted to wait until penitent 
enough, but we came to see that no repentance 
can be accepted as an atonement. We wanted to 
wait until we had faith enough, but we saw that 
our faith could not be our saviour. We wanted 
to wait for an experience deep enough to warrant 
our trusting it, but we saw that if God had made 
promises to sinners, those, and those only, were 
the foundation for our hope. And when aware 
that we had no worthy conviction nor penitence, 
no worthy faith nor experience, to bring as a plea 
for God's forgiveness, then there was borne in 
upon our souls the fact — its fitness, its proof — 
that we needed no such pleas, since Christ had 
provided for all this; needed not to bring these 
things to buy what he freely would give ; needed 
not to make peace, because the peace was already 
made for us, if it was true, as was claimed, that 
the Lord had done it himself upon the cross. 

7* 



78 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

At the exact point of each of these wants, the fit 
supply seemed to our waiting souls a positive 
proof that this was no fiction, but a fact ; no false- 
hood, but a truth — a truth whose statement was 
its own sufficient evidence. As in the physical 
world there are scenes which once looked upon 
live in our minds a joy and a delight for ever, so 
in this moral realm the soul, seeing Jesus Christ 
as the very Saviour it needs^ and that he is its 
complete Saviour the instant it trusts itself with 
him, will never forget that it has stood on this 
mount of vision and looked with new eyes on a 
truth which, once beheld, abides for ever, because 
divinely imprinted in the deepest and choicest of 
human experiences. 

There are also many persons whose conversion 
seems to them to be a new inward life. They are 
conscious that the old deadness has given place to 
a peculiar stir of a deeper part of their natures. 
Religion has found them at a lower depth, and 
has awaked there a feeling before unknown. It is 
as if something had been begotten in the hidden 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 79 

nature that has heart-throbs about it. There is 
all the tender tremulousness of young life. There 
is more heart about such persons than they had 
ever dreamed. There is larger capacity of loving 
— even for loving the unseen God. Nothing 
makes heart in a man like these experiences. His 
whole being broadens in receiving the facts and 
doctrines of the religion of Christ. He feels 
himself, not only in a new, but in a higher and 
broader, kingdom, in which all the personages 
are nobler and all the objects are of a superior 
kind. And to match these things and persons he 
has himself a peculiar and sympathetic life. 

It is told of a scientist, as devout as he was 
eminent, that he never could bring himself with- 
out pain to destroy the life of a fly, or even of a 
plant, for in the presence of life it seemed to him 
that he stood nearest to Deity. All know what 
life is. Yet no man, for his neighbor's satisfac- 
tion, even if for his own, has ever defined this 
something that we call life. We only know that 
it is a something which makes certain things do 



80 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

as they do. But we come no nearer to saying 
what that thing is. We describe, but do not de- 
1 fine. Nor should we be surprised if this spiritual 
life also eludes our definition. Asked to prove 
the reality of our physical life, we should proba- 
bly say that we know we live ; and that would be 
for ourselves the best of evidence. The one to 
be satisfied that this spiritual life has begun is 
one's own self; and, happily, God provides for us 
the most satisfactory possible evidence in our per- 
sonal consciousness. It is a thing capable of being 
tested by each man for himself. " Come and see " 
is the gospel call. It was the Baconian method, 
proposed centuries before. Bacon was born. The 
gospel has outward facts; it has also its formu- 
lated doctrines ; but, best of all, it has its per- 
sonal experiences, that are furnished to every 
man who will try them. And the testing can 
take place, not in the realm of mere taste or sen- 
timent, along the surface-lines of the soul, but 
down among those moral convictions which are 
the deepest, most emphatic, and most certain of 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 81 

any we can ever know. And unnumbered mil- 
lions of men have made, each for himself, the 
test, and have known the throbs of this new and 
divine life. " I am as free as a bird," said one 
who for years had felt inwardly bound and hin- 
dered from duty. The soul under this new life 
does spontaneously what it tried vainly to do in a 
merely mechanical way. It springs up with a 
sort of alacrity, as though obedience were now 
the natural thing for it. It acts easily, as though 
it had found its place and its work. 

We must notice the fact that this result seems 
to many persons to be a sort of secondary effect 
of truth upon their souls. When first impressed 
their dislike was aroused. In some cases there 
was opposition, and even hatred. Truth was un- 
welcome. They saw that it was important, but 
felt that it was repugnant. Then, after a certain 
time more or less definite, these hated things were 
loved, these unwelcome truths were joyfully re- 
ceived, and the tenderest affection took the place 
of dislike or of hatred. Surely this is not the 



82 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

natural result of things. One might ask how 
long a man must hate in order to come at length, 
naturally, to love the things hated. Many of 
these persons who come into this experience of 
renewing have a distinct apprehension of some 
other and higher power as acting upon them. Of 
themselves, all apart from what they think is a 
divine leading, they would not have gone in their 
darkness to Jesus Christ for their light. Once 
dead Godward, they feel that another's touch has 
given them this new and bounding spiritual life. 
They have come by some blessed inward process, 
which they love to ascribe to God as its Author, 
to be, as they think, new creatures in Jesus 
Christ, 

And the new life created by God is a divine 
life. The life he evokes in plant, in bird, in 
beast, in the human body, in the natural facul- 
ties of the human soul, is not divine life in kind. 
But this sense of oneness with God is so delight- 
fully new and peculiar that one looks back with 
wonder at the old state of separation and loneli- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 83 

ness, when one was without God and without 
hope in the world. The soul has not only come 
upon a higher plane of living, but lives itself by 
the throbs of a higher life. 

In the studio of Powers at Florence a company 
of Americans were gazing on that statue which has 
made his name immortal. We almost expected 
to see the heaving breast, to witness the change 
in pose as it should take some other form of 
beauty and grace, to hear some fit words from 
those exquisitely-formed lips. The silence while 
we gazed entranced upon the statue was becoming 
painful. Meanwhile, unnoticed, a beggar-woman 
had crept into the studio with a bundle in her 
arms. There was a faint cry. We looked up 
involuntarily to the lips of the wonderful form 
before us. But there was no voice from those 
lips, and when the cry was repeated from the beg- 
gar-woman's arms, and a little form began to toss 
its little limbs, we saw in the child before us 
something more wonderful than the marble mir- 
acle—something that had what the statue had not, 



84 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

the mysterious endowment of life. And by that 
one thing it was separated, for ever and immeas- 
urably, from any mere work of human art. There 
is a religion that is sometimes a very beautiful 
thing in its ideal and its finish, but it is lifeless. 
It is the result of mallet and chisel ; it is wrought, 
perhaps, with all care and patience. But, after 
all, it is mechanism, and not life. It may be a 
growth in all outward relations ; for it may grow 
as grows a stone, by adding new particles upon the 
exterior. It may grow as grows a statue, under 
subtractions as the artist hews and chips and pol- 
ishes. But it is not the growth of life, the pecu- 
liarity of which is growth from within. There is 
a religion which has such an inward and central 
life that it takes up and assimilates all things that 
it can use, and reproduces raindrop and sun- 
beam and congenial soil in new forms, by a 
growth that is no mere cohesion of outward par- 
ticles, but a product that has the unity, exube- 
rance, and spontaneity which are at the farthest 
possible remove from anything like mere aggre- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 85 

gation and mere mechanism, however skilful and 
beautiful. And this new life, divine in origin 
and in kind, in every renewed soul beats in time 
and in tune with the life of God. 

As, to some men, there is the new sense of light 
and of vision, and to others the new sense of life, 
so to a third class there is, at conversion, the feel- 
ing that they are led. They do indeed go, but 
there is One who goes before them, as the pillar 
of flame and of cloud went before the Israelites 
all the way from their Egypt to their Canaan. 
Life has its dark problems, its thorny ways, its 
perplexities of duty, its precipices of danger. 
"The way out?" is the question for man the 
wanderer. So long has that way been lost that 
there is no remembered landmark, and men have 
striven, with a zeal that was almost desperate, to 
find it. In the Catacombs the student had lost 
the silken thread which was his clue to all his 
turnings, and by which only he could find his 
way back to the light of day. It fell from his 
hand, and he forgot for the time to look for it. 



86 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

Waking at length to the consciousness of what he 
had done, he groped his way in hope of finding 
the lost thread, but all in vain. He was lost. 
On his knees he fell to pray God to receive his 
spirit. As he clasped his hands they touched 
something. It was his lost clue. He was saved. 
There are multitudes who have had this sense of 
the clue as fallen from their hands. And only 
when they have come to God in prayer have they 
been led out. Another must guide our faltering 
hand or we are in hopeless confusion and distress. 
It was a star in God's heavens that led the in- 
quiring sages from their Eastern home to the 
Bethlehem manger. But before they set out, 
what thick clouds of uncertainty must have shut 
them in ! what dreary longing and looking for 
some solution as they asked the question of the 
ages, " What is truth ?" what struggles with 
things too high for them to know ! whaj; mock- 
ings from the philosophy of their time as it dark- 
ened counsel with unmeaning words! what dis- 
appointment and restlessness and baffled hope! 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 87 

Only by such an experience could they be made 
willing to be led. 

Modern thought has grown eloquent over u the 
virtue of self-abnegation." Fichte and Goethe and 
Carlyle are all given to the praise of the doctrine 
of "going out of one's self." "Unless above 
himself a man can erect himself, how mean a 
thing is man !" But Fichte's self-abnegation is 
to be made by bringing in the idea of the infin- 
ite ; Goethe's, by sacrificing the objects of sense to 
those of soul ; Carlyle's, by the bravery and scorn 
of the nobler against the baser in man. All these 
are new words for the old, world-worn conviction 
of all ethics — viz. that it is better to subject the 
sensual in us to the moral in us. But how is 
this the " going out of self" at all ? It is simply 
leaving the basement for the higher stories of the 
same building. It is only a more dainty Epicu- 
reanism. If you make the better part of self 
a god, you no more go out of self than if you 
make a god of the baser. No more do you get 
at self-abnegation through intellectual or even 



88 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

moral self-culture. And for the same reason : by 
it there is no going out of self. Says another : 
"If there is anything in art that can take the 
place of religion, we should like to see it. If 
there is anything in culture that can take the 
place of religion, it has not yet revealed itself. 
Culture is centred in self. Self is the god, and 
self is the model of culture. Why should it not 
ultimate in selfishness? Culture assumes that 
what is present in a man needs only to be de- 
veloped and harmonized to lift character to its 
highest point and life to its highest issues. It 
carries no idea of self-surrender, which is the first 
fact in practical religion of any valuable sort, and 
the first fact in all good development. Greece 
and Rome had plenty of culture, and are still our 
teachers in art, but the beauty that looked upon 
them from every hill and gate and temple could 
not save them from their vices. By and by cul- 
ture will learn how powerless it is to make a man 
that shall be worth the making, and what poor 
instruments science and art are for uprooting 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 89 

the selfishness that rules the world. It is slowly 
learning this, and men who have bowed low to 
her have been touched with that divine discontent 
which nothing but religion can allay." * 

No man can possibly go out of self except as 
before another self. The w r ill is personal, and is 
to yield to another's will. Nothing is harder than 
this same self-abnegation. How men have strug- 
gled at the task ! They have left the world for 
the cell and cowl, only to find that they have car- 
ried self with them. The only true self-abnega- 
tion is furnished in the gospel, in which we sub- 
mit all to Jesus Christ. Coming to see that we 
shall get worse and stray farther, that our own 
wills are wrong and impotent for good through 
sin, the soul is led to make choice of Christ's will 
as one always wise and strong and right. De- 
spairing of self-guidance, it accepts a better guide. 
So that what it calls "coming to Christ" is the 
real going out of self. That which the philo- 
sophic thought of the time sees as the thing most 

* Dr. Holland, in Scribner. 



90 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

needed is actually done by every humblest be- 
liever when, to use his own striking phrase, he 
"yields to Christ." Fichte's phantom of "the 
infinite," Goethe's fiction of the " over-soul," Car- 
lyle's bepraised " scorn of the wrong and worship 
of the strong," and Emerson's dream of the 
"power of culture," are all impotent to save a 
man from himself. It is claimed that Jesus 
Christ is a able to save unto the uttermost." He 
alone, of all who have ever stood on this planet, 
has been able to give men the true idea of self- 
abnegation by furnishing another self, wise enough 
and broad enough to absorb our native selfishness. 
The true self-abnegation is seen when Paul heads 
a countless host, saying, "I am crucified with 
Christ. Nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but 
Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now 
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of 
God." 

There is a hymn sung just now on all the con- 
tinents. It runs : 

" Oh, to be nothing ! nothing !" 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 91 

But ending there, it would be the song alike of 
folly and of impossibility. But it continues : 

" Simply to lie at his feet — 

Empty, that so he might fill me, 
For the Master's use made meet." 

" Out of self and into Christ " was a good man's 
motto, but Paul's was better : " Christ liveth in 
me;" and both are true to Christian feeling. 

Into this state of submission we never stumble. 
We never happen to feel thus. We cannot work 
ourselves up and into it. To it, in every case, we 
are led. 

It is a characteristic of those in whose experi- 
ence this consciousness of being led of the Lord is 
prominent, that they are wont to look back over 
former years, and to find in them that they were 
unconsciously brought on toward the hour of con- 
version. A man did not see it as one step toward 
that result when, on a New Year's Day, he felt 
that it would be right and wise to sign the tem- 
perance pledge ; when, on another day, he deter- 



92 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

mined never to use again a profane word ; when 
he yielded to a friend's words and entered the 
Sunday-school ; when he took a seat for himself 
and family in the sanctuary as a thing that was 
respectable and fit and right. He had not thought 
of God as leading him : at that point he might 
have rebelled against the thought had it occurred. 
But these are now seen to have been steps by 
which God was bringing him onward to the place 
of blessing. And even when there is much of 
human instrumentality, the devout heart recog- 
nizes still the divine leading. It was a struggle 
to get to the place where one was willing to be 
led. And some person, thought by us the most 
unlikely, was used of God's providence to awake 
or guide us Godward. A plan in which a certain 
sort of conversion should occur had been drawn; 
such and such steps we would take ; self-help had 
large place in our scheme ; such and such a pro- 
cess we must go through before we would be sat- 
isfied. What wonderful, perhaps even romantic, 
ways were to be taken as we should come into 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 93 

the kingdom of God ! But it was all entirely 
unlike our dreamings. We were not converted 
in the way nor by the means we had expected. 
We had to submit that thing also to God, and to 
be willing to be led. If God had some instru- 
ment to be used, we were to take that way of his 
appointment. In some direction or other there 
is always the soul's submission to the divine sov- 
ereignty. Self gives way to God. The rebel 
makes no terms. To the victor it belongs to pro- 
pose the conditions of the surrender. No human 
soul ever does this thing of its own accord. The 
impulse and the strength are felt to be given by 
him who is leading us one step at a time. We 
ask, "Can I do that thing?" Perhaps not to- 
day. But you may have been led on so far by 
to-morrow that you will gladly do the thing which 
yesterday you thought it impossible that you 
should ever consent to undertake. Step by step 
goes the old reluctance ; step by step comes in the 
new desire. Object after object is surrendered. 
There is the consciousness of letting go, one after 



94 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

another, the things we had held so fast. And 
now they all are yielded, and the soul is led into 
God's perfect peace. At this point nothing is so 
dear and delightful as to have God's will done in 
us. There is the sense of God's presence bending 
about us on every side, as the skies over the earth. 
And the whole heavens are full of light and love. 
How easily, then, we are led ! How smooth the 
path ! 

But souls that have learned the leadings of God 
in the open day are led sometimes, for their good, 
to walk a little in darkness. The sun goes down, 
and neither moon nor stars appear. The skein of 
things is tangled, and providences are as confused 
almost as if there were no God. But these dark 
hours are sometimes a heavenly discipline. We 
learn in them to walk by faith. We grow into 
the child-feeling that we cannot take a step alone, 
and we reach out as for the parent's arms that we 
know are spread for us. There is an old picture 
of a young pilgrim walking over a narrow path. 
There are precipices hundreds of feet deep on 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 95 

either side. One wrong step and the pilgrim is 
dashed down those frightful walls of rock. But 
his eyes are closed, and a smile is on his face. 
For just behind him is. an angel, the tips of whose 
wings, reaching forward, are resting upon the pil- 
grim's shoulders and guiding him safely. Mul- 
titudes of men feel that they have had guidance 
better than angelic. There is a divine guidance 
which is gentle yet potent, and in which the soul 
feels calm and sure and safe. 

The phenomenon of renewal has one more man- 
ifestation which offers itself to the careful student. 
It is that very peculiar consciousness which relig- 
ious people agree in calling the sense of the for- 
giveness of sin. 

A Christian missionary was setting forth the 
claims of Christianity to a native of Farther India. 
The heathen hearer interrupted him. " No mat- 
ter for the future/' he said ; " about that, my re- 
ligion speaks as well as yours. What will your 
religion do for me now?" The missionary began 
again: "But your religion will do nothing about 



96 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

that sense of sin that you have now in your heart. 
Your religion tells you that you must expiate sin 
yourself in the other world. It does nothing for 
you now or ever. Christianity promises to do 
something about that sin for you, and to do it 
now. It offers you now forgiveness of your sins" 
Never before had the idea entered the poor man's 
mind. Sin, he thought, must be suffered out, not 
blotted out. Its burden must go on into the next 
world. And it was a revelation to him that it 
might he forgiven here and now. And as he de- 
parted the missionary heard him repeating it as 
if it were a new truth fresh from heaven — " The 
forgiveness of sins ! the forgiveness of sins !" 

And it is a new conception to thousands not 
born in heathen lands when first they see the real 
meaning of that familiar word, " forgiveness." 
Incited to some earnest care about personal relig- 
ion, how many are unconsciously legalists ! They 
inquire about the doing of some worthy thing. 
They set themselves anew at the moralities; they 
may undertake in a legal way some of the gospel 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 97 

duties. They are bringing a worthiness to make 
amends, in part, for the old sinfulness. But this 
is all opposed to the forgiveness of God. For it 
is in the idea of forgiveness that we do not deserve 
it. We can be forgiven only as we have been 
guilty. Merit is expressly excluded from par- 
don. Grace is favor to the undeserving. Exact- 
ly as far as a man thinks that he makes amends 
by the goodness of his penitence or his reforma- 
tion, he removes his conduct from the need, and 
so from the possibility, of forgiveness. Forgive- 
ness goes only as far as sinfulness. And the wor- 
thier one deems himself, the less he thinks he 
needs it, until, " forgiven little, the same loveth 
little." 

And as the Legalist, so the Romanist in one 
way and the Restorationist in another completely 
miss the idea of forgiveness. The cme believes 
that a part of his sins must be self-expiated in 
purgatory by years or eras of sorrow. But if 
thus self-expiated, they are not divinely forgiven. 
Suffered out is the exact opposite of blotted out. 



98 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

Forgiveness is conditioned upon sinfulness. If 
by purgatorial sorrows these sins are duly punish- 
ed, there is no more sin against the man to be for- 
given of his God. So, too, the Restorationist, 
with his Protestant purgatory, in which, by ages 
of purifying sorrow, sin is to be purged out of all 
doomed souls, succeeds completely in missing the 
idea of God's forgiveness of sin. For at the end of 
these thousands of years no more penalty would 
be due. And when no more is due because no 
more ought to be suffered, how is forgiveness 
possible? All ideas of self - worthiness to be 
achieved as the offset of sins committed, and 
equally all ideas of self-expiation to be paid by 
ages of future suffering, are not only opposed to 
any idea of forgiveness, but they show that the 
peculiar Christian idea, sin forgiven, has not 
really entered the mind. 

But when some plain man has felt the sin-con- 
sciousness which comes to all men in their highest 
moral moods; has stood face to face with self, 
guilty and without excuse before God ; has seen 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 99 

that something must be done to remove this 
fatally-crushing load ; and then has gone to God's 
word in study and to God's throne in prayer, — 
this plain man has found a solution and an an- 
swer which have been revealed to him, as he 
thinks, by the Holy Spirit. For he has found 
what those who have sought elsewhere by other 
ways have always missed — that singular and yet 
most certain of the states of one's religious con- 
sciousness — the inward sense of sins as forgiven, 
that new state of inward experience in which the 
old condemnatory feeling has departed, and the 
man stands in some way cleared of his old guilt 
and lightened of his old load. As one said in the 
olden time, reading aloud his conscious sense of 
forgiveness, " Thou wast angry with me, but thine 
anger is turned away, and thou comfortedst me." 
This man has become truly a philosopher in tak- 
ing the attitude of a disciple. For he has come 
by the process of an experimental moral science to 
his facts before making his theory. By methods 
of the soul, more nimble and not less accurate 



100 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

than those of the merely logical faculties, he has 
ascertained the great truth of the forgiveness of 
sins. And sometimes the time and the place and 
the circumstances of this moral event have been 
so stamped upon his soul as to be a permanent 
part of its experience, to perish only with itself. 
The soul has come into its newly-found peace, not 
by securing its own or God's indifference to its 
sins ; on the contrary, its own sense of God's sense 
of its sinfulness was never so great as at the hour 
when the old sin- consciousness departed. To be 
forgiven is not to be forgotten, but to be remem- 
bered. In receiving pardon, the souPs conscious- 
ness is exactly the opposite of that experienced in 
other hours in which it was seeking to be excused 
for its guilt. It cannot brook, in these times of 
clear moral vision, any dishonest hiding of its 
wrong by God or angels or men. It has the 
sublime honesty of being willing to be told the 
truth about sin. And as sin is a thing that could 
not be known without reference to its exact oppo- 
site of righteousness, so the perception of the right 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 101 

of all righteousness and of the beauty of all holi- 
ness is, at the same time, both seen and enjoyed. 
What the world does not know, because ignorant 
of the forgiveness of sins — that God is the right- 
eous Father— is revealed to the soul along with 
the new sense of the divine smile now enjoyed. 
So that the sin-consciousness has given place to 
the consciousness of a forgiveness that makes for 
righteousness. And this involves a perception 
of holiness as something that is characteristic and 
desirable — something which is strangely bright 
and glorious, and which is also very captivating 
to the renewed soul. 

Now, all these experiences are a study to any 
thoughtful man. They involve more than they 
are. They must have some answering objective 
facts. They exist, but they exist as reflections of 
something outside of the human soul. They are 
sunlight, which is not only proof of the sun, but 
emanation from the sun-substance. And the re- 
ligious experience of renewal, whether presenting 
itself under the form of conscious vision, conscious 



102 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

vitality, conscious leading, or conscious forgive- 
ness, is a fact which challenges the thought of the 
plainest man and the study of the most philo- 
sophic. It means something. It is a series of 
phenomena. There must be a cause for these 
mental and moral facts. They are especially 
worthy of notice. They demand an explanation, 
which the unbeliever is as much bound to furn- 
ish the world as is the Christian. The men who 
make this claim of inward renewal are too many 
in number and too high in character, and their 
testimony is too important to all interests in this 
world and the next, for any one to ignore the 
question of the meaning of these great moral 
phenomena. 



CHAPTEE IV. 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE IN ITS LIMITATIONS. 

On a summer's evening, passing a clear sheet 
of water^ I see, reflected from its smooth surface, 
the image of the moon that is riding through the 
sky above. I do not need to look up into the 
heavens, but only down into the lake, to be cer- 
tain that the moon is shining. For some pur- 
poses I can study the moon in the lake as well as 
if looking upon the moon in the sky. If it be 
any question about its color, its shape, or its mo- 
tion, I can discuss that question quite as well over 
the image as over the object. It must in any case 
be an image on the retina of my eye, whether it 
comes from the image in the glass of the tele- 
scope, or from the polished surface of the lake. 
Nothing can be more certain to me than that there 
is a veritable moon — a moon above to match that 

103 



104 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

which appears below — as I gaze upon the watery 
mirror. But change the conditions. Let the 
storm-wind roughen the waters. And now there 
are a hundred moons in the lake, and an indistinct 
image of each one. Yet by looking carefully I 
see that they are all in certain lines, and are just 
what I might expect if there were but one moon 
in the sky, which was reflected from a hundred 
mirrors of wave, each at a different angle to my 
eye. And so I have no more doubt than before 
of the one moon, which I now study in new and 
less favorable circumstances. But I must now 
make due allowance for the disturbed condition 
of the lake. 

In the religious experience there are disturbing 
influences. The image of God is never perfectly 
reflected. Divine truth is never mirrored with 
absolute exactness in a human soul. There is 
the universal imperfection of material. There is 
no infallibility save with God. Certain enough 
we may be for all practical purposes, that this re- 
ligious experience within has an outward and 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 105 

objective reality in God and his truth. But the 
medium of the human soul is always imperfect. 
And it is its experiences under this limitation that 
we now are to study. If we can see just where 
to look for the expected error, and can know 
about what allowance to make for the disturbance, 
we can do in moral science as men do in physical 
science. The astronomer makes. allowance for the 
glasses of his telescope ; for the refraction of the 
light in which he sees his star; for the vapors 
in the air; for the lapse of time; and even for 
his own personal equation as one who more or 
less quickly sees and notes the swiftly-passing phe- 
nomena of the skies. So the mariner's art con- 
sists in knowing the general facts of course and 
distance, and in making allowance for the tides and 
currents of the sea; for the apparent places of 
the stars ; and even for the variations of the very 
compass by which he sails. To make the proper 
allowances is no small part of the arithmetic of 
common life. And it is exactly what we should 
expect to discover, w T hen we are getting at the 



106 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

value of the religious experience in the human > 
soul, that certain elements of error are to be cal- 
culated, and due allowance made for them. 

There is, for one thing, what may be called the 
mixed experience. In strictness of speech, a good 
deal of what passes current for Christian feeling 
is not such at all. There are moods of mind in 
which Christians sometimes find themselves that 
are very unchristian. There are experiences of 
weakness, waywardness, and wandering; yet these 
are mixed with something of right feeling and 
of true piety — gleams of Christian consciousness. 
Sometimes these experiences are more of self than 
of divine grace. It is a great lesson to learn, this 
lesson of human nature in religion. For God 
uses the old material even in regeneration. It is 
not another's soul, but our own, that he takes when 
he would renew it in the " image of his Son." 
It is not a soul composed of new faculties and 
animated by another personality, but the same 
soul made over, and newly made as to its govern- 
ing principles. But the peculiarities which make 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 107 

us ourselves and not somebody else are all there. 
The old material shows, even when God does his 
best work upon us. So I have sat down to two 
volumes issued by the same publisher and print- 
ed from the same plates. One of them was broad 
of margin and its paper carefully toned, so that 
the book was the daintiest specimen of the print- 
er's art. But in the other the material was poor 
and thin and covered with defects, and, though 
the words were the same, the page was only half 
legible to the most careful eye. In judging of 
the reality of a man's piety some persons make no 
allowance for his human nature. Worst of all, 
the man may not yet have learned to make the 
requisite discount for himself. And so for many 
an honest convert there is disappointment when 
the freshness of early feeling wears away. To be 
tempted from within was an idea that never oc- 
curred as possible for a real Christian ; and he is 
ready to give up, if not his hope, at least his 
zealous labor, afraid lest he should play the hyp- 
ocrite in continuing to profess what he does not 



108 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

possess. Many noble souls are thus severely tried. 
And when in this way thrown down, they are but 
too negligent of duty, and men see them at a dis- 
advantage, and judge them accordingly. The 
convert had heard that the ways of God were 
ways of righteousness and his paths peace. He 
expected to find struggle outside the gate. But 
it did not occur to him that, once in the fold, there 
were conflicts with self. It is a surprise and a 
grief, and sometimes an utter discouragement, that 
all prayer is mixed with sin, and all service with 
imperfection. But slowly he comes to find that, 
inside the gate, one part, at least, of his nature is 
on God's side. It is not, as formerly, a warfare 
against grace, but now against nature ; nor yet 
against all the nature in him, but only against 
that part which is not entirely subjugated to Jesus 
Christ. Is it nothing that the castle is actually 
taken? that Christian thought and feeling are 
actual victors? that the flag of Christ floats over 
the high towers of the citadel, though here and 
there a room may be found from which the enemy 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 109 

is not yet dislodged ? What if it should turn out 
that there are richest gains in this appointment of 
conflict, not only in the victories obtained and in 
the satisfactions to be finally enjoyed, but in the 
knowledge of our own self, as we measure our 
strength against spiritual forces, and find by pain- 
ful but salutary experiences that our motives have 
much of alloy mixed with their gold. But the 
image reflected from the broken sea, however con- 
fused in form or uncertain in position, is never- 
theless the image of the perfect moon. It is an 
image the result of two factors, the ruffled lake 
and the unruffled sky. And, in knowing the 
heavenly orb by this disturbed reflection, we learn 
at the same time the condition of the lake itself. 
As we best learn of our impotence when, having 
attempted to grasp the thought of God's power, 
we have made a pitiful failure, so it is that we 
come best at the knowledge of the mixed and im- 
perfect motives that have swayed us when we 
undertake to use our souls for the purely right 

under the eye of the Perfectly Holy. And yet 
10 



110 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

in all this confusion it is possible to discover a 
method — in all this imperfection, a vision of the 
perfect truth. Time was when this man was not 
pained by evil thoughts, nor disturbed by lack of 
purity in service, nor anxious to be right with 
God. Time was when there was no special dis 
tress at the mixture of motives in the right ac- 
tivity — when, if the act was right, with an out- 
ward righteousness that met the approval of good 
men, there was little care that it should meet the 
approval of God. Plainly, one stands higher 
now, and his vision is the clearer. The man is 
better, else he would not be pained by suspicions 
that he is worse. More things are seen to be 
right, and to be right means more. Blinded 
once, the man did not see that motives might be 
mixed in human conduct. Once men were angels 
or demons. Now they are men ; and God's grace 
no more changes the separating characteristics of 
individuality than the shape of the face or the 
color of the hair. The experiences of religion 
are man's experience of them. And if nothing 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. Ill 

else so discovers to us the divine grace as these 
experiences, it is as true that nothing else so 
brings out the essential manhood. 

But this human element, if in one way a weak- 
ness, in another way is a strength. It gives us a 
sympathy with other human natures which are 
also erring. There is not a little danger lest men 
should feel that we are proving something against 
them, in pressing duty upon them. They think 
that religious men take the Godward rather than 
the manward side in the great controversy ; that 
the hindrances from an evil world and a sinful 
nature are not duly estimated by the more relig- 
ious part of the community ; that there is too 
much urgency of God's claims, and too little al- 
lowance for the universal human frailty; that 
truth is held for truth's own sake, and not for the 
sake of mankind. And it is, doubtless, true that 
in maintaining righteousness we may seem to be 
lacking in sympathy for the offender. How hard 
to be just, yet not severe — true to God and not 
false to man ! In strong ethical moods, when 



112 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

duty stands out sharply, and right is a clearly-cut 
gem, we can brook no failure nor hesitation in 
men till we look within and see directly, over 
against their mistake, our own wrong in some 
other thing. In the audience of the world, one 
only has been able to rise and say, " Winch of you 
convinceth me of sin ?" Even of inspired men it 
is true, by their own confessions, that in personal 
character they were far from perfect, their inspi- 
ration furnishing honest record of mixed expe- 
rience, as they moan and sob out confessions about 
their unclean lips and the sin in which they were 
born. 

And this imperfection clinging to everything 
human shows itself sometimes in a certain nar- 
rowness of moral judgment. Unconsciously, one 
becomes intolerant of all whose experience differs. 
The particular truth used of God for one's own 
conversion is held to be the Alpha and Omega of 
all religion. In the blaze of its radiance it is for- 
gotten that God may glorify other truths, so that 
each one of them may be a beacon-light to the 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 113 

straining eye of some anxious mariner. The very 
brilliancy of the one transfigured truth which we 
saw in the mount of vision may make us wish 
to build there a tabernacle, forgetful that there 
are men down on the plain that need our help 
if we are the Master's true followers. Conversion 
may become the all of religion, and the one truth 
that gained us admission to the Lord's highway, 
instead of an open door to further advancement, 
may be used as a bar to further progress. We 
are too easily satisfied with acquiring a fine know- 
ledge of the alphabet. The grand wholeness of 
truth does not tempt us out of our partialism. 
The sun shining in its full- orbed strength gets 
little notice, while we content ourselves with* 
watching the one ray that shines through the 
crack in the shutter. We become intense where 
we should be diffusive, narrow where we should 
be broad. There are some good men that never 
get further than penitence ; others that never go 
beyond pardon ; and yet others that stop with the 

consecration of natural energies to God's cause, 
10 H 



114 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

nor ever come into that ripe and rounded expe- 
rience which results from study and meditation 
and prayer over the full truth of the gospel. And 
in the end it comes about that this man holds less 
firmly to his one truth, about which his experience 
gathers, than if he took in the truths that are next 
of kin. For all truths of the gospel are related. 
Each truth really involves and compels all the 
rest. You can tell by its shape what place the 
stone is to occupy in the arch, and from it you 
can calculate the exact spring of that arch and 
show how large the other stones must be, and 
where they are to be placed. Some good men 
have always lived in the stone- mason's yard, 
keeping watch and ward over their particular 
stone, defending it with equal zeal from those who 
would deface its beauty and from those who would 
build it into its position. No one stone is the 
arch, no one truth is the gospel. If any man 
thinks God has given him a truth to hold, he will 
keep it safe by keeping it close to its fellow-truths. 
For truth is not for the sake of system, but for 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 115 

man's sake. Unchangeable in itself, we are ever 
to grow in our comprehension of it, and it is to 
minister to our experience. Men may be busied 
over truth, and yet be without experience of its 
sanctifying power. Religious truth is used by 
some men as a sort of mental gymnastics. It 
helps brain rather than soul. The mind may be 
getting sharp instead of the heart larger; and this 
intellectual athletism may be mistaken for Chris- 
tian experience. But the heart cries out for the 
bread of God, wherewith to satisfy its hunger and 
help its growth. And all prayer and study of 
the word of God, and all counsel with other 
Christians, and all active work in winning souls, 
and all broad charities for extending Christ's 
kingdom, are to be used diligently, that we be not 
moral dwarfs, but Christian men. Yet some good 
men stop in their development with conversion, 
and all their solicitude about others is that they 
may be converted, as though regeneration were 
the end rather than the beginning of religion in 
the soul. And so some become shallow them- 



116 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

selves and perpetuate their own shallowness. 
Their reading of the Bible is simply the search 
for promises that they may gain comfort. They 
crave promises, as a miser craves gold. They 
wonder that there is anything else in the word 
of God. This man meets some little book, like 
Daily Food or Scripture Manna, which contains 
collections of these promises torn from their con- 
nection. He thinks these are golden nuggets al- 
ready separated from the granite in which they 
were imbedded. Before he knows it, this man's 
Bible is dusty, while his Daily Food is dog-eared. 
Here is the " food " ready at hand, and he cannot 
be thankful enough that somebody has cracked 
the hard nut and permitted him to feed on the 
fruit itself, without any of the trouble or toil of 
gathering and preparing it. And when the first 
surfeit is over, he may find that his Bible, on 
which he is now thrown, is constructed on a 
wholly different plan, and may experience not 
a little disappointment. Afterward, when his 
narrowness is thrown aside, he may be able 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 117 

to rejoice in God's perfect plan of a perfect 
revelation. 

And what shall be said of the mistaken expe- 
rience that comes from pushing a truth out of its 
relations and making it the centre of a system ? 
A great many men are thrown off their moral 
balance, being seized upon by a dogma which is 
correct enough in its place, but which, when made 
too prominent, is as ridiculous as it is mischievous. 
We are all creed-makers, in spite of the denial 
of those who insist that no one should have a 
creed save him whose creed it is to deny that right 
to others. And the systems men build determine 
often the amount of thought they give to religion, 
and so determine the religious experience. There 
are good men who have fixed their eye on the fact 
of Christ's second coming. To minds of a certain 
order there is a singular fascination in the theme. 
A number of texts lead them to infer that the event 
is near, but it is forgotten that an equal number 
declare its distance, and that therefore it belongs 
to the class of truths which are to be near to our 



118 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

emotion, while they may be either historically 
near or remote in point of time. In warm, emo- 
tional hours, the first coming seems near. The 
centuries depart. We almost feel as if we had 
been there, at the manger and at the cross. So 
much have we dwelt on the facts that the element 
of time drops out, except indeed when we are re- 
called to it. At such hours of vivid feeling we 
are one with those who looked on the Lord. It 
is the same with the second coming. It grows 
vivid as we study it ; it becomes near. Just 
at this point we have heard men confound their 
personal impressions with Christian experience. 
Asked why they believed that the coming of the 
Lord was to take place at or near a given day, 
they have said that they felt it to be true. They 
have put it on the same ground as a convert's ex- 
perience who has " felt his sins forgiven." But 
we submit there can be no Christian experience 
of such an alleged fact. For the belief has been 
shown, in the mistakes of every generation for 
eighteen hundred years, to be unfounded. Even 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 119 

if it is near in time to-day, it was not near in 
time centuries ago, when some good men believed 
that Christ would appear in their own generation. 
The " near " of Scripture must certainly be eigh- 
teen hundred years long. That Christian experi- 
ence does indeed connect itself with the fact q{ the 
Lord's coming, apart from nearness or remoteness 
in time, is obvious. For some men have found 
their whole religious life deepened and strength- 
ened when this glorious doctrine has been held in 
due connection with the central truth of a cruci- 
fied Lord. For not the reigning but the crucified 
Christ is the world's hope for its recovery from 
sin in all the biblical presentations. When these 
past generations of mistaken men have claimed, 
as some of them have done, that the coming of 
the Lord on a given day, a given year, or even 
in a given decade, was to be accepted because of 
the "witness of the Spirit" or the "felt certainty, 
as surely so as is a convert's experience," we say 
unhesitatingly that though the fact of Christ's 
coming may be comprehended in experience, the 



120 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

time of it can never be a thing of experience until 
the fact shall have occurred. Whatever of such 
a feeling gathered itself about any day or month 
or decade or century was not Christian experience, 
but merely unfounded impression — an impression 
unwarranted, as time has shown, by any objective 
fact, and so spurious and mischievous; an im- 
pression, as all church history has shown, detri- 
mental to those persons and churches and ages in 
which it has prevailed. A mistaken moral expe- 
rience follows naturally a mistaken intellectual 
exercise. For there is such a virtue as intellectual 
honesty. There is a morality of the intellect. 
There is a just way of thinking, and "soundness 
of mind" is an excellence which the Scriptures 
commend. 

Some persons, in their religious belief, are the 
victims of mere circumstance. They stumble 
upon an idea a little out of the common line of 
thinking. They have nursed carefully their 
foundling. They have given it a place such as, 
were it a proven truth, it does not deserve. The 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 121 

fact that it was not announced in any of the well- 
known creeds of the churches should have made 
the man hesitate to accept it. There is a great 
deal of very good thinking done inside the church. 
Theologians are by no means musty men. They 
buy and read more books of science and of phil- 
osophy, heretical and otherwise, than any other 
class. The men who penned the usual church 
creeds had considered this man's crudity of doc- 
trine before he was born, and had buried it out 
of sight, as one of those half-truths which are the 
worst falsehoods. How surely should a wise man 
make a long, a very long, pause before breaking 
with the great Christian conviction and experience 
of eighteen slowly-moving centuries of men who 
were the equals of any now living, in power of 
thought, and whose means of knowing the truth 
about all questions pertaining to experimental re- 
ligion were precisely equal to those we possess to- 
day ! For though we justly boast of discovery 
and invention, it is obvious that our advancement 

in these respects does not give us so much as a 
11 



122 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

hair's breadth of advantage in a question of right 
and wrong. There is no proportion between so 
many steamships built and so many decisions of 
conscience in a matter of Christian duty. The 
grand volume of consenting study and thought 
and experience for eighteen hundred years, as to 
the great fundamental doctrines of the Christian 
religion, is a thing from which a sound-minded 
Christian will dissent with great reluctance. It 
is hardly likely that so many millions have missed 
the corner-stone of Christianity, and that you, my 
good brother, have found it. You are not so 
much keener as to make it probable that you 
have discovered the truth hidden until now; not 
so much more pious, that God should have select- 
ed you to revolutionize his church ; not so much 
more fortunate in other things, that you should ex- 
pect men to believe that you have stumbled upon 
any accidental wisdom in religion. It is better 
to be sound of mind, and use caution and care as 
to God's precious truth, humbly receiving what 
God has said, and learning to walk with him, like 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 123 

Enoch of the olden time. The essentials of the 
Christian experience, to which the ages of believers 
bear witness, gather themselves about the Re- 
demption by the Cross. They are the members 
in the system of which it is the centre. Many a 
good planet, doing well in its place, would make 
a poor sun ; for in that position it would not only 
injure the order of the system, but damage itself. 
There is a symmetry to divine truth, and there 
should be a proportion to Christian experience 
and character, in order that the gospel may not 
be presented by us to the world as a thing mis- 
shapen and unlovely. 

It is indeed true that God, when he takes a 
believer in hand for growth in grace, often em- 
phasizes, in his dealing with him, one truth at a 
time; so that this man's experience resembles, 
even when genuine, a half-drawn circle. But in 
such case the half circle is not out of the true 
curve ; and the circle can be calculated, and you 
can decide just where the line will run when com- 
pleted. The erroneous and the incomplete are not 



124 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

to be confounded. They differ in kind. God is 
drawing the curve, and the line passes through 
certain fixed points of Christian doctrine. So that 
Christian experience, varying never as to these 
settled points of doctrine through which its curve 
produces itself, is always progressive, in that the 
curve between the fixed points is continually 
drawn a little nearer the perfect circle. The lines 
are a better approach to the true line, and they 
are deeper cut. Now and then God pauses, as it 
were, at some point in the circumference, and we 
stay long enough to learn a lesson of experience 
that will be remembered for ever. God may se- 
lect any one Christian grace, and through it lift 
the whole spiritual life of a believer into a higher 
plane. 

A Christian woman, a teacher in one of our 
seminaries, had felt deeply concerned for the spir- 
itual welfare of her pupils. They were young 
ladies going out into the world with superior men- 
tal furnishing, but she mourned that many of 
them were not, personally, Christians. She had 






THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 125 

invited her pastor in the city on the evening of a 
summer's Sunday to address them. The subject 
of his sermon was faith. It was a simple, direct 
discourse. Under it some young hearts bowed to 
the claims of Christ. But perhaps the strongest 
impression was that made upon the mind of the 
teacher herself. She saw, as she afterward said, 
for the first time, the meaning and the worth and 
the position in the Christian life of this grace of 
faith. Her whole former religious life seemed 
to have been mainly a thing of obedience to con- 
science, rather than of the reception of a gift — an 
honest effort to do, rather than an act of hearty 
faith in what God had said and Christ had done. 
That night was one in which she was sleepless 
through joy. She had "seen the whole matter of 
faith in a new light. Wave after wave of truth 
had come in upon her, and the soul seemed to 
grow large enough to receive all the truth of God. 
Faith was a new thing. It had never appeared 
like that before." And the uplifting of her whole 

spiritual nature was manifest to all who knew her, 
11 * 



126 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

and in the light of that " old truth made new " 
she experienced a richer blessing than she had 
ever known before. The Christian grace of faith 
was that through which God had led her into a 
more complete sanctification of soul. 

At about the same time, and in the same city, 
there was a gentleman who had for a few years 
been ready in private to acknowledge himself a 
Christian believer, but who would make no open 
profession of his faith. On no special religious 
service could he be persuaded to attend. His 
spiritual life was at the lowest possible point con- 
sistent with its existence. One day the text, 
" And when they saw the star they rejoiced with 
exceeding great joy," came to him with a singular 
force. It was God's message to him. He had 
seen the star-light, but had not followed it. The 
star-light had come again to him, as the second 
time to the sages. Now he must follow it. The 
star to him was the wonderful love of God in the 
gift of Jesus Christ. The thought seized on his 
mind and heart. He could think and speak of 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 127 

nothing else. It was not a text from which a 
man would be likely to gain the largest concep- 
tions of the divine love, but it meant all that to 
him. And the star became a sun, and light and 
love filled up to overflowing his whole nature. 
It was evident to all who knew him that God was 
leading him into richer and deeper experiences in 
personal holiness. And the Christian grace by 
which this gain was made was that of holy love. 
Under it his whole nature expanded, and his 
whole life was marvellously quickened. 

At about the same time another gentleman, 
nearly seventy years of age, a man of eminently 
pure character, trusted and honored alike for his 
intelligence and probity, was led of God into a 
more complete sanctification, in a wholly different 
way. Converted in early life, and never denying 
the work of God's grace in his soul, he had been 
led in some unaccountable manner to neglect the 
duty of the open and public profession of his faith. 
His sympathies were always with Christian peo- 
ple. His life would have honored any church. 



128 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

By degrees the neglected duty assumed to him 
the most formidable proportions. To be baptized 
was more difficult than to go to the stake. At 
length he made the mental compromise, that when- 
ever God should give him a certain degree of re- 
ligious emotion the long-neglected duty should 
be done. For forty years he had thus remained 
stranded upon this barren shore. Revivals came 
and went, and he, each time wetted by the incom- 
ing waves, was never launched into the flowing 
tide. One day there flashed upon him the story 
of Israel at the Red Sea. Foes north of them, 
mountains south of them, mountains west of them, 
and the deep sea in front on the east, God bids 
them " Go forward." They lift the foot, and then 
the sea opens. This man felt that for forty years 
God had been saying, " Go forward !" to him. 
Meanwhile, he had been saying to himself, " When 
God opens the way, I will go." But his duty, he 
now saw, was to put out the foot, even if it reach- 
ed over the yielding wave. God would open the 
way to the lifted foot. Filled with the thought, 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 129 

the man came to the church, and told them his 
position. He wanted to be baptized. He would 
go in the dark, yielding the point he had made 
with his God. Instantly, when he had obeyed 
the command, it was as if all the withheld enjoy- 
ment of forty years had been bestowed. He had 
not to launch the stranded bark ; it floated off 
itself on the swelling tide of delightful religious 
feeling that came in upon his whole nature. H » 
was young again, and the delights of simple faith 
in God, of duty done, of obedience rendered to 
God his Saviour, were his constant themes. The 
light of that hour never went out. And his was 
a specimen case of that wonderful accession to 
one's spiritual life, that peculiar blessing of a 
more perfect sanctification, which God sometimes 
bestows through the grace of trustful obedience. 

These instances — and every observer of spirit- 
ual phenomena has seen many such — are cited to 
show that God, by some one grace, may marvel- 
lously deepen a man's experience of the things of 



130 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

his kingdom. Instances might also be cited of 
other ways that he has employed, and other truths 
that have ushered the soul into a higher life. 
These are given to show the variety of his meth- 
ods — a fact which needs to be carefully noticed, 
lest we become exclusive in our views of Christian 
sanctification, and censorious to those not led in 
the same way. There is great danger that one 
shall put the narrowness of his own experience' in 
place of the breadth of God's grand methods. 
There have been those who, selecting some one 
Christian grace in which God has given them 
special blessing, have claimed to be completely 
sanctified, and have disputed whether such a po- 
sition is gained by " perfect trust " or by " perfect 
love " or by " complete consecration." It is not 
observed by many who stand in close relations to 
persons professing the " perfect rest of faith," or 
the " exercise of perfect love," or the " grace of 
entire consecration," that such persons are in any 
higher religious position than many others. It 
has been frequently asserted that the opposite is 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 131 

true. A supposed gain in intensity in some one 
grace, at the expense of all the others, has been 
frequently observed. There are graces of meek- 
ness and forbearance, of patience under contradic- 
tion, of generous brotherliness, which are essential 
to any rounded and symmetrical character. It 
may be that God has withheld the blessings of 
perfection in any one grace, because he has seen 
how liable to spiritual boasting and to unspiritual 
censoriousness are those who suppose themselves 
to have reached, nearly or quite, such a state. 
There can be no doubt of great accessions, made 
sometimes suddenly and sometimes gradually, in 
the spiritual life of Christians, now through faith, 
and now through love; at one time through trial, 
and at another time through duty. But when 
this blessing leads any man to claim a perfection 
in any one grace which is impossible without per- 
fection in every other, since all graces are related, 
then his claim becomes a mistake with reference 
to himself and a damage to the religion he pro- 
fesses. Physicians tell us that in the case of certain 



132 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

patients who are really sick, and who must have 
careful attention, there is need of making allow- 
ance for their honest over-statement of the symp- 
toms. In such a case, physicians easily under- 
stand that certain kinds of symptoms are contra- 
dictory, and cannot coexist. They make the neces- 
sary allowance for personal equation. It is not 
needful to suppose that such patients are hypo- 
critical, nor yet fraudulent ; but only that, right 
as to the fact of sickness, they are mistaken as to 
the degree of their malady. One may accord all 
honesty to such experiences of religion as are, in 
the nature of the case, clearly abnormal. One 
can account for them by considering the mental or 
moral position of the man making the claim. A 
mind more sure in its conclusions, more even-paced 
in its motions, capable of more careful discrimina- 
tions, endowed with more ability to construct a 
true ideal of symmetrical manhood, and able to 
take into its comprehension all those complex 
elements which go to make up the full-orbed 
Christian character, would hesitate to make claims 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 133 

as fatal to modesty as to justice, and as much op- 
posed to the convictions of the holiest men as to 
the declarations of the word of God. 

But an experience which, though helpful to the 
intensity of a particular religious feeling, is really 
harmful on the whole, by its sacrifice of all sym- 
metry and roundness of character, may yet be 
worthy of very careful study. Excesses in some 
one line may be useful to the observer who would 
build himself up in the religious life. It is pos- 
sible, w r hile looking with sorrow upon the man 
who counts himself to have attained, substantially, 
a perfection in some one grace, as of faith, or of 
love, or of self-surrender, to see, in such an ab- 
normal experience, elements that rightly mingled, 
and powers that rightly ordered, would be of the 
greatest value to one's own development. In get- 
ting at a true anatomy of the human system the 
scientist learns almost as much from diseased as 
from healthy action. Nor need one confound the 
truth with the error in these religious experiences 

which are abnormal, when in the Bible we can 
12 



134 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

find a standard of perfect purity, by which to 
measure them.* Not by our feeling are we to 
interpret God's truth, but by that truth we are to 
judge our feeling. It is the danger of any ex- 
perience which is one-sided, intense on any single 
point, that it will seize on separate texts — will find 
in these secondary planets the sun of the system, 
and make all the heavenly bodies, the sun in- 
cluded, revolve about its tidbit of firmamental 
brightness. Then comes the setting of texts in 
wrong places ; the quotation of words about 
Christ's outward work by which we are justified, 

* Herbert Spencer, discoursing of moral law, says : " It 
will be urged that, whereas the perfect moral code is confess- 
edly beyond the fulfilment of imperfect men, some other 
code is needful for our present guidance. To say that imper- 
fect man requires a moral code which recognizes man's present 
imperfection, and allows for it, seems at first sight reasonable. 
But it is not really so. A system which shall recognize man's 
present imperfections, and allow for them, cannot be devised, 
and would be useless if it could be devised." Thus the ethics 
that would omit God, and the Scriptures that declare him, 
agree that no man is perfect by the one only standard of 
righteousness. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 135 

as if they referred to the Spirit's inward work by 
which we are sanctified ; noble verses, that have 
in them the ideals of Christ's perfected work, 
used as if descriptive of the Christian's present 
state ; our perfected position in Christ confounded 
with our imperfect character as his followers. And 
all this from putting an experience which may be 
very much distorted above the testimony of God 
in his word. The sense of the Scripture is to be 
determined, like any other document, exegetically 
— by giving fair value to the meaning of the 
words. And, this done, we have the standard 
to which all experience is to be subjected : that 
which agrees is to be saved, and that which 
does not is to be cast away. Seldom does the 
miner find gold that has no alloy — seldom the 
chemist his substances which are without trace of 
impurity. Friction must be estimated in judging 
of the power of the machine. The lens is never 
quite perfect in the grinding. No eye is quite 
true in its judgment of lines. No feature in the 
face of beauty is as perfect as is the ideal. And 



136 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

it takes not one iota from our conviction as to the 
reality and the worth of a Christian experience 
if there is sometimes lacking that perfect work 
which, upon better material than this rough and 
scarred and battered substance of our human na- 
ture, would be more grateful to the eye of him 
who studies the results of God's grace in the re- 
generation, sanctification, and salvation of men. 
Not yet do we witness the perfected workmanship 
of God. Not yet is the iron hammered into shape 
on the anvil. By and by he may put these souls 
through processes which shall bring out an expe- 
rience so much more rich and complete and scrip- 
tural, that they shall almost come to think them- 
selves hitherto strangers to any true religious life. 
They see men now as the half-healed man saw 
objects, when men seemed to be trees walking. 
Another touch shall be given, and trees shall 
stand as trees, and men shall walk as men. Mean- 
while, the partial vision is better than entire blind- 
ness, and is a prophecy of the perfected work. 
In considering these limitations, perhaps a few 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 137 

words should be given to certain unfair methods 
of testing religious experience. It is sometimes 
named, as an offset to the claim of divine influ- 
ences as the cause of these religious phenomena 
in the human soul, that they may perhaps be ex- 
plained as the filling out of a preconceived ideal ; 
that conversion has been made to be desirable by 
early religious teaching ; that there is a theolog- 
ical training of expectancy which prepares for this ' 
result. So that when the sense of right and wrong 
is for any cause sharpened, the sense of condemna- 
tion becomes active, and that when the man is in- 
duced to step out on a new course of conduct, he 
supposes that the expected and requisite change 
has come to him. But this explanation — which 
is the most plausible that can be offered on the 
side of mere naturalism — even if allowed to have 
any force, can only affect the form, and not at all 
the substance, of the phenomena : it may shape 
somewhat the words in which a convert shall 
" tell the old, old story," and that is all for which 

it can account. Moreover, the explanation is a 
12* 



138 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

charge, in softer and more delicate terms, that 
there is a hallucination about these millions of 
instances of conversion; thus compromising many 
of the noblest souls among men, in their highest 
moral states — a charge that modest persons would 
be reluctant to make, unless both the moral and 
intellectual superiors of these foremost millions 
of Christian souls. It is a sad thing if we must 
account for so much of goodness, of purity, and 
of holiness, by regarding it as the result of a hal- 
lucination. It would not only upset, but exactly 
reverse, all our ideas of cause and effect, of right 
and wrong, of truth and error. The outcome of 
all moral inquiries would be the obliterating of 
those distinctions that make religion and morality 
either possible or desirable. For the mightiest 
propulsion to righteousness would be reduced to a 
mental and moral fraud ; and we should succeed 
in destroying the distinction between the right 
and the wrong in our moral nature, by destroying 
the distinction between the true and the false in 
intellectual convictions. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 139 

But the fact which meets us is, that any attempt 
to play off this idea of hallucination elsewhere 
does not work at all. Men have been under the 
hallucination that they were poets, painters, phil- 
osophers, and prophets, but it has not made them 
to be such. They have expected it often and 
earnestly enough ; but the artistic expectation has 
as little converted them in an instant into artists 
as the moral expectation would have converted 
them in a moment into Christians. When this 
charm works well elsewhere and does something 
real, we will sit down and consider whether it be 
anything worth one's notice as an explanation of 
the " highest, divinest facts in man's whole moral 
history." 

But the remarkable thing appears to be that, in 
a vast number of cases, the Christian experience 
was not expected at all ; and even where there 
was some general idea of it, the conversion came 
about in such a way as to overturn all the pre- 
conceived ideas as to how one was to be changed. 
Take the typical case of Paul. He certainly had 



140 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

no expectation of any conversion. A supernatural 
conversion was the last thing that could have oc- 
curred to him as an ideal. He certainly did not 
try to work himself up into thinking himself a 
converted man. No theological training prepared 
him to imagine such a hallucination. He was 
neither fool nor knave, neither deceived nor de- 
ceiver. In his case, there was not the distemper 
of a preconceived experience. There could be no 
mental nor moral intoxication, rendering him the 
expectant recipient of a phantom change, and so 
victimizing his manhood as to render his report 
of the facts suspicious or untrustworthy. His ex- 
perience, in its outward supernaturalism, is given 
in the Acts ; in its inward supernaturalism, in the 
Epistles. The two coincide in the fact of sud- 
denness. He was smitten instantly in body and 
soul. The thing occurred at a given hour, in a 
definite place, its reality being attested by his own 
altered life as declared by himself and as impress- 
ed on eighteen long centuries of Christian thought 
and feeling and activity. His bad career was in- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 141 

stantly stopped, supernaturally. He began a life 
which was as new a life as if he had been created 
a new being at that instant. Every love, taste, 
ambition of his life was not only changed, but 
reversed ; not only turned, but turned right about. 
A bitter persecutor became in an instant a hum- 
ble disciple, and a whole life, other, better, sweet- 
er, purer, nobler, proved both the reality and the 
divinity of the change. And, if the outward 
manifestation be excepted — a manifestation that 
was useful only as an intellectual proof to him 
of the truthfulness of Christianity, and a miracle 
needless, and so impossible, to-day when abundant 
proof is presented to the intellect — the case of 
Paul is paralleled a thousand times in the Chris- 
tian centuries. Nay, more. For while Paul did 
not expect such conversion, there have been con- 
verts who not only did not expect it, but scorn- 
fully denied it, and poured unsparing ridicule upon 
conversion. There was no working up of feeling 
to an ideal point of a supposed regeneration. 
They wanted no such thing, believed in no such 



142 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

transformation, expected no such experience. It 
was wrought in accordance with no preconception. 
Tt was no attempt to realize an imaginary trans- 
formation, since everything of the sort was most 
vehemently denounced and denied in all their 
previous course of life. But these men became 
suddenly and keenly impressed. At a given mo- 
ment, consciously to themselves and visibly in 
their conduct to others, there was the deepest kind 
of a change of character which it is possible to 
imagine. Take men of the olden time, like Gri- 
gen and Justin Martyr and Augustine,* or of the 
modern time, like John Newton, John Bunyan, 
and Dr. Nelson. And when you remember that 
these are only specimen instances of tens of thou- 
sands of men, who have met with a sudden change 
which is lower down than anything accomplished 
by merely human will-power — only specimen in- 
stances of men in whom there is an entire reversal 
of character — how evident it is that the natural- 

* See Neander's Mem. Christian Life for the narrative of 
these conversions. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 143 

istic way of accounting for the phenomena is 
ridiculously inadequate ! 

Another form of unfair testing is that by which 
it is proposed to account for these cases as instances 
of the sudden awaking of the moral powers in our 
human nature. It is alleged that many persons 
claim this experience at a tender age, when they 
are just becoming conscious of their position as 
before moral truth ; so that the work is more nat- 
ural than supernatural. But here, again, the ob- 
jection is futile. For multitudes of young people 
awake to the sense of a soul within, and a con- 
science that should be its guide, and, instead of 
going on to conversion, go off in just the other 
direction. Why do any disobey if the conversion 
is just the natural unfolding of the moral nature ? 
If the conversion and the awaking of the moral 
nature always took place at the same time, there 
would be at least some show of reason in the in- 
timation that they are the same thing. But what 
shall be said of the full-grown men and women 
who are thus changed, and who, consciously, years 



144 THE CHKISTIAN EXPEKIENCE. 

before, came to the knowledge that they had moral 
powers, and who have actually used them, though 
in wrong ways ? As for the few instances in which 
conversion occurs at the dawning of moral con- 
sciousness, they are just enough to show that no 
age or time is excepted from the peculiar drawing 
given to men by the Holy Spirit. The wonder is 
that the two do not oftener synchronize. And 
when conversions, occurring earlier and earlier 
with the centuries, shall more frequently take 
place at the dawn of consciousness, it will only 
show the wisdom of the divine Agent, the Holy 
Spirit, in selecting the fittest time and the fittest 
subjects for his converting work. Meanwhile, 
since the world seems to need continued pipoof 
that religion is not the education and culture, 
but the conversion and sanctification, of our hu- 
man nature, we may believe that adult souls in 
whom for years there has been, not only the 
awaking, but development, of moral powers, may 
continue to receive those divine influences which 
do indeed rouse yet more the moral nature, but 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 145 

which also create in it a new kind of spiritual 
life. 

A word also as to the unfair testing which pro- 
poses to regard religion as a moral epidemic. In 
special revivals, multitudes profess conversion. At 
one period, European history was so altered by a 
revival of religion that it has been known as the 
time of the Great Reformation. It has been 
gravely proposed to regard these periods as dis- 
turbances somewhat similar to those which occur 
when a human mind is thrown oif its balance — 
as periods of delusion, of hallucination, of abnor- 
mal action. That the human mind may be un- 
hinged and deranged, and that whole communities 
have been under a spell of delusion, is not for a 
moment to be doubted. That wickedness has 
also had its sad revivals, and that Satan has been 
allowed to go forth and deceive, and even, as in 
our Lord's time, to affect men's bodies and souls 
by the virulence of evil powers, is not denied. 
But right over against these sad facts there are 

glad facts. There are instances of the uprising 
13 K 



146 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

of a great people in favor of liberty; instances 
where vast communities have been seized upon 
with a desire for education that has been a very 
passion in its intensity; instances in which cer- 
tain centuries have been visited with an unwonted 
love for letters and the higher learning. These 
things we all very well know. There have been 
waves of temperance revival that have passed 
over whole continents. There have been broad 
and sweeping reformations of morals and man- 
ners, of thrift and of prudential saving. And 
some of these broad movements of masses of 
mind have brought incalculable happiness to 
millions of the human race. For they are not 
all epidemics of evil. They are often of exactly 
the opposite character. Upborne upon them, 
thousands have received freedom, have become 
temperate or intelligent or thrifty, who, apart 
from the great movement that reached them, 
would have made no such gain. The hope of 
the world, that which prevents its stagnation, that 
which gives promise of counterbalancing and 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 147 

overcoming all the great movements of evil, is 
the prevalence of these right motions among vast 
masses of men as they are moved toward freedom 
and temperance and education and thrift; and, 
above all, toward religion. For there can be no 
doubt to which of these two great moral move- 
ments religion belongs. It is evidently and dis- 
tinctly on the side of the right, and it is as evi- 
dently and distinctly opposed to the wrong. 

Nor need we be detained by the proposed test- 
ing of religious experience by some who, in the 
fact of being deceivers or deceived, have shown, 
in that they left religious people, that they were 
not really of them. No doubt there are in re- 
ligious, as in all other similar movements, spu- 
rious developments. There are, especially as the 
result of the imperfect teachings of those who 
conduct revivals, and the imperfect perceptions 
of men who are moved upon in them, a consid- 
erable number of instances of spurious faith, of 
hypocrisy, and of a superficial experience ending 
in apostasy. This result always belongs to great 



148 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

moral movements of the higher kind ; and the 
higher the character of the cause the more con- 
spicuous the failures. There is such a thing as 
falling from religion — that is, from a profession 
of it — while there is no such thing as falling 
from scepticism and irreligion — a fact proving the 
exalted character of Christianity, since any sin is 
recognized as a falling below its claims. It is plain 
that a man can be converted in his sensibilities 
by religious truth, and the work, stopping there, 
and having no hold on his moral nature, will per- 
haps be as transient as the occasion which awakes 
it. In a Romish cathedral, the kneeling crowd 
shall weep under the service that moves the sym- 
pathetic nature. But hardly outside the door of 
the church, thesad profanity of those who have just 
knelt shall show that the moral nature has expe- 
rienced no change. At some rude camp-meeting, a 
rough man who came to scoff finds himself moved 
strangely to bow at the altar in prayer. He may 
be truly converted, or he may be simply touched 
in those surface feelings easily excited by propi- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 149 

tious circumstances ; and the week after you shall 
find the man farther from religion than ever. 
But it is to be noted that the influence that makes 
a man better for a day or a week shows itself to 
possess a certain potency, which, if it should take 
firm hold of the depths of his nature, would 
change him effectually and permanently. That 
there should be men whose convictions do not 
reach the hidden springs of their life is just what 
we should expect from some men and under some 
teaching. Where much is made of the human 
Avill as a factor in the result, or where conversion 
is represented as a mechanical thing, in which 
one " goes forward " or " rises for prayer " as a 
"first step" in religion, is it wonderful that many 
fall away? It was a prediction of the Author 
of Christianity, that there should be tares and 
stony ground, and that some of the early-springing 
wheat should come to nothing, because there was 
no depth of earth. But no man refuses to eat the 
full-grown wheat because some of that year's har- 
vesting was spoiled in the growth. That this 
13 * 



150 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

thing, in some cases, impedes the progress of re- 
ligion; that conversions are sometimes shallow; 
that apostasies and hypocrisies are always to be 
seen, — may doubtless be a hindrance to many who 
are perplexed and made unbelieving thereby. But 
deeper natures find benefit therein. For they seek 
carefully, lay broad foundations, watch against 
deception, and, in the end, are more successful 
through the spectacle of other men's failures. 
Were it always true that the successes in religion 
came through human will and human effort alone, 
then God would not be honored as the only Saviour. 
Could we make an exact equation and say, So much 
labor equals so much result; so much will-power 
equals a conversion ; so much eloquence and learn- 
ing equals so many converts, — we should be tempt- 
ed to think conversion a purely natural and purely 
human process. But the fact of failure here and 
there ; of spurious conversions under apostolic 
teaching and preaching; of Judas and Simon 
Magus among supposed converts, when the instru- 
mentalities were the most perfect, — shows that 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 151 

conversion is not proportionate always to effort, 
that truth needs a higher power than itself, and 
that each genuine convert is made only by the 
work of the Holy Spirit. 

And thus it comes about that all these limita- 
tions — whether from the imperfection of material, 
the partial conceptions of those who are used as 
instruments, the mingling of elements that are 
mixed in character with those that are pure, and 
even from unfair modes of testing — are, each and 
all, when carefully examined, not only not valid 
objections to the genuineness of the religious ex- 
perience, but are incidental confirmations. Ceas- 
ing to be hindrances, they pass over into the list 
of helps to us in understanding God's work on 
human souls.' _ 



CHAPTER V. 

CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AS A CONFIRMATION 

What proof have we on some dark and dreary- 
day that there is a sun ? No eye sees it. Direct 
proof of the sun's existence we have not. But 
suppose on such a day there were some beautiful 
flower that had been endowed with the gift of 
consciousness, so that it knew itself and all the 
influences which had made it what it is. It has 
taken in the sunlight for many long hours, and 
used it. It has absorbed and retained the solar 
rays, so that all its colors are really sun-colors. 
Its growth into its present beautiful form is due 
to what it has received. It is not more conscious 
of itself than it is of the sun that has made it to 
be what it is. Its voice about itself is also neces- 
sarily its voice about the sun ; so that if your ear 
is sharp to hear its testimony, and your eye quick 

152 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 153 

to note its gesture, it says to yon, most impres- 
sively, that there is a sun; you may look into its 
own heart and be as certain of the fact of a sun as 
if you could pierce the clouded sky and behold in 
the rift the sun's direct radiance. The Christian 
experience has taken up, absorbed, retained, em- 
ployed, the great facts of the religion of Jesus 
Christ. And out of its consciousness, when we 
shut for the hour the lids of the revealed word, 
we may learn them anew. The flower certainly 
exists. The Christian experience certainly is a 
reality. And when that reality is once establish- 
ed on an independent basis, it becomes in turn 
a wonderfully strong confirmation of our great 
Christian facts and doctrines. It gives us light 
on many questions, which, though settled for all 
believers in the Bible by its testimony, are con- 
sidered as yet open for the admission of proof by 
those persons who listen with especial interest to 
the utterance of the moral nature in man. 

Does this Christian experience give us anything 
of value upon the question of a direct knowledge 



154 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

of God? There are, among those who discuss 
the question mainly on the basis furnished by our 
natural faculties, three distinct views. The first 
view insists that by virtue of our natural powers 
we do directly take cognizance of God ; that it is 
a sort of innate knowledge ; that the idea is 
stamped indelibly on the human soul, is wrought 
into its very texture and can never be taken out 
of it ; that the idea is natural, necessary, univer- 
sal. A second view finds the idea, not in the 
mind, but the mind waiting for it ; finds antici- 
pations and preparations for it in the structure of 
the soul and in our position in a world full of 
evidences of design ; finds man ready to draw the 
inevitable inference that there is a God. A third 
view is that the idea of God is evolved in the act 
of the soul when it acts as a moral agent. Aware 
of itself as capable of moral exercises, it finds itself 
acting more or less perfectly in view of an Author 
who is not itself, but is its God. As in common 
consciousness in relation to the outward world we 
know the " me " and the " not-me," and could not 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 155 

know the one without the other, so in this moral 
consciousness, the " not-me " involved in knowing 
the " me " is a personal agent, the All-Holy One, 
who gives, if not the existence, at least the neces- 
sary sanction, to the distinction between the right 
and the wrong.* The feeling thus arising in the 
soul becomes afterward a feeling that the intel- 
lectual consciousness comes to know, and about 
which it may gather material which shall be for 
a buttress to the building. But the structure 
itself is raised on this foundation of a moral con- 
viction, involved in all moral activity of the soul, 
that God is, and is One with whom we have di- 
rectly to do. 

Each of these views quotes, in confirmation of 
itself, the fact that man is a religious being — that 

* " The word right involves something complex. It im- 
plies that as certain things exist in all men potentially, so 
may the conditions be demanded which shall secure their ex- 
istence actually. It further implies, since the case involves 
demanding j that there is a Power somewhere which shall make 
the demand attended to, or punish those who refuse." — W. 
H. Mallock, in Atheism and the Rights of Man. 



156 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

" no nation or tribe has ever been found without 
some worship, however rude." But on the fur- 
ther question of the testimony of history as to the 
belief in one God, the more cautious authors speak 
with some reserve. Says Gillett: "It is a re- 
markable fact that in the earlier history of some 
of the most ancient nations we meet with evi- 
dences of the prevalence among them of a religion 
closely approximating, at least, to monotheism." * 
Hitter and Max Muller have asserted that in the 
old Indian Vedas " the three elements probably 
represent only a single deity — the Great Sou]." 
And Schaff has said, " Greek and Roman panthe- 
ism rested upon a dim monotheistic background." 
Another, summing up the evidence, declares : " In 
spite of polytheism and a corrupting mythology, 
in spite of popular depravity and perverted ethics, 
man's reason, when honestly followed, has led 
him to the conviction of the existence of a Su- 
preme Intelligence." 

Is there not a fault in all these methods of inves- 

* God in Human History, page 1. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 157 

tigation ? Have not men sought to answer these 
questions out of the contents of the general relig- 
ious feeling of the race, rather than out of that 
special experience of Christian souls wherein man 
stands highest and nearest to God ? But if these 
methods have been faulty, and if they have failed 
to establish in this way all that it was hoped to 
gain by them, they have been at least useful in 
bringing out this very significant fact, that " the 
further we go in following up the stream toward 
its source, the purer we find it." The fact indi- 
cates what revelation declares, that there was a 
primal golden age, a sinless Eden-state, when man 
was directly in communion with God. If this be 
so, then, as the fall was the loss, conversion should 
be the restoration, of the former direct communion 
with him — a restoration now elementary, but in- 
volving, when it shall be completed, the direct 
knowledge and apprehension of him whom to 
know aright is eternal life. The convert's feeling 
is often one of restoration, and the happy and 
grateful soul looks up and says, Abba, Father. 

14 



158 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

It thinks it understands something of the feeling 
of those old Eden days when God walked with 
man and man with God. For it walks in the 
light, as he is in the light. 

The quotations already made as to the belief of 
the nations show that the great race-consciousness 
has in it a dim memory of the old-time glory. 
They show also that men are striving to pierce 
this misty recollection and bring actual shapes out 
of the half- remembered consciousness. Hence 
the instances of souls reaching out that way, 
"feeling after him if haply they might find him." 
Hence the failure in some men to find, except 
very dimly, the natural recognition of God in the 
moral consciousness, and the almost enforced 
recognition of him in the logical consciousness. 
Hence the contradictions among men in their 
testimony as to what is the way of coming to 
know that there is a God. The natural man does 
not get the distinct vision. Hence the need of 
the manifestation of God to the newly-bestowed 
consciousness in a regenerated race. And the ex- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 159 

perience of the individual Christian would fall 
singularly short of meeting man's foremost and 
deepest need if there were no rising vision of God 
in the soul. Put the case thus: An original con- 
sciousness of God, direct, unclouded, perfect in the 
Eden-state — a new consciousness of sin coming 
into the soul at the fall, the latter blurring, ob- 
scuring the former, so that the best men shall 
debate the question, whether there be any of the 
old apprehension of God now left to the unassist- 
ed powers of man. Let the loftiest souls almost 
come in sight of it, barely failing, and sometimes 
almost believing that they have seen the disk of 
the orb rather than the diffused light behind the 
clouds. Let it be true, that at some moments 
some souls see the beams, at least, of this sun. 
But the vision on the retina is never quite sharp 
enough to catch the picture. The photograph is 
never perfect, through defect of material. A sort 
of nebulous consciousness is always waiting to be 
resolved — the star-dust always ready to be seen as 
compacted and planetary, and yet the clear vision 



160 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

never attained. Let this be the problem. Now, 
there is only one solution possible. It is not, dis- 
tinctly, one of culture, but it is, as distinctly, one 
of regeneration. And the test of the regeneration 
will be the restored holiness by which a man can 
"see God." 

If at this point we bring in the witnesses, we 
shall find they say exactly what should be said to 
meet the case in hand. God was dim, they say. 
His voice was low and faint, the spent echo of a 
vanishing sound. At length he came in upon 
them as a Person. The sin-consciousness was the 
conviction of an offended God. It was not im- 
personal law, but a personal God, against whom 
they had sinned. Law simply measured offence ; 
it did not constitute it. There is no conviction 
worth naming as a basis for repentance till we get 
beyond our conscience, which is only a milestone 
with God's name on it. If there be a primary 
fact in the Christian experience, it is the felt con- 
viction of a person under obligation to a person, 
of man to God. If consciousness can take cog- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 161 

nizance of anything, it is of a soul as dealing 
with God and God dealing with the soul. Start 
with the one, you find the other involved. Begin 
with God's requirements, and you slip easily into 
the soul's sinfulness. Begin with its sin, and the 
soul ere it knows it is acting under a sense of 
God's holy inspection. Reason in its action in- 
volves the existence of truth, which it does not 
make, but which it finds already made in the only 
sphere in which it can act. No more does the 
moral consciousness make God, but it finds him 
in the only realm in which it can do its work.* 
As in our common consciousness of self we feel 
that, through sensation, we get at the outward world 
as a real existence and touch a real thing, so in 
these experiences, unless all moral consciousness is 
misleading, we do " come to God." f It is to be 

* See Smyth's Religious Feeling, opening chapter. 

f My more philosophical readers will see the bearing of 

these claims that the religious consciousness directly knows 

God upon certain current questions. Sir W. Hamilton's 

doctrine of " the unknowable" developed afterward by Mansel 
14* L 



162 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

noticed that these moments of genuine introspec- 
tion often appear suddenly, as if a shaft had been 
sunk in an instant through all the strata of the 
soul, and we had got to the bottom of an old and 
concealed consciousness. The soul may approach 
a normal experience many times in its history, 
perhaps through sickness, calamity, or through 
some sudden Spirit-leading. It really touches 
bottom, however, only in the act of conversion.* 

in The Limits of Religious Thought, was used by him with 
such convincing force against Rationalism that, if correct, it 
swept away all religion with it, Mr. Mill accepted Hamil- 
ton's theory, only complaining that he did not carry it out far 
enough. Herbert Spencer has " carried it out," and with it 
undermines alike all philosophic and religious belief, in his 
doctrine of "Nescience" and its kindred doctrine of the 
" Relativity of all Knowledge." To all this there is one an- 
swer given by the common consciousness of every man ; for 
we are made to believe in the " veracity of our human facul- 
ties." But the only complete answer is that of the Christian 
consciousness, as, with its clearer vision and standing on the 
loftiest heights it is possible for man to occupy, it claims the 
fulfilment of the promise, " they shall see God." 

* "Man was made originally to be even conscious of God, and 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 163 

In such hours we do not deplore accident, but 
confess sin. It is not social rules nor moral laws 
that meet us. We get back of them to God. In 
knowing ourselves better w r e know God. Into 
all the language of Christianity there are inter- 
jected such phrases as " knowing ourselves as 
God knows us" and "seeing ourselves as God 
sees us." The souFs highest thoughts are before 
this felt sense of the presence of the Highest Per- 
son.* The thought of God was once unimpress- 
ive, because the sense of him was vague. Now 

to live eternally in that kind of immediate knowledge — was 
made to have just such an immediate knowledge of God as of 
himself. This consciousness of God has been closed up by 
sin, and is set open by faith. . . . What is called Christian 
regeneration implies this immediate knowledge of God with- 
in. After your reasoning, faith is still to come ; . . . the 
roads of the natural understanding are in a lower plane ; you 
must rise and go up into trust, and know God." — Bushnell, 
in Sermons on Living Subjects, pages 116, 117. 

* " The essential characteristic and the innermost power of 
human nature is its capacity to receive the divine likeness." 
—Smyth, Old Faiths in New Light 



164 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

he becomes, in conversion, no more the unknown 
God, but every highest feeling responds to his 
presence in the soul. If he were not real, and if 
he were not really there, would there be these best 
moods of penitence and holy gratitude, of alle- 
giance to him? Always there is the feeling in 
such souls that they are lifted out of self. Can 
self lift higher than self? Is the "shadow of 
self" brighter than the sun? And the phenomena 
noticed in previous chapters, the sense of light 
and vision, the sense of being led, the conscious- 
ness of the divine pardon, — all have in them the 
same trend. They go Godward until they find 
him. The renewed soul " cries out after God the 
living God." Only when it can say, " My God !" 
is it satisfied. It has received already, in a mea- 
sure, the blessing of " the pure in heart," to whom 
is the promise that they shall " see God." 

It is by no means meant to affirm that the sight 
is as full at conversion as when the glorified have 
open vision in heaven, but only that it is as real. 
The apprehension of God may be immediate, while 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 165 

the comprehension of him will always be a thing 
of measure and limit ; for when can the finite 
ever fully comprehend the Infinite? I can di- 
rectly see the ocean, apprehending the idea of it 
perfectly, though my vision is far too limited to 
comprehend its broad expanse. 

Close upon this consciousness of God is an- 
other, which to many minds is hardly a sepa- 
rate feeling — the Christ - consciousness.* The 
sense of want, vacancy, enthralment, is one form 
of what some have ventured to call the Christ- 
want. It is, in this first form of it, a need rather 
than a longing. But the deeper moral nature in 
us, that ethical sense, the primal thing in man, 
which acknowledges the law of perfect right, 
though it has been so much disobeyed, makes a 
man ask, whether there is not somewhere a pure 

* " The most thoughtful, best, and noblest souls must have 
a Christ of some sort. The Christ-want is a constitutional 
want. In proportion as the Christ- want of the human soul 
can be shown to be a simple human want, ... it becomes 
the prophecy and pledge of its own ultimate satisfaction." — 
Old Faiths in New Light : Smyth. 



166 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

and holy One who has always obeyed it. And 
there is a craving for that kind of a Christ, if for 
any. And so the need becomes a want — sup- 
pressed, but uttering itself, though with stifled 
voice, as though some prisoner in deep-down dun- 
geon were making himself heard through all the 
crevices that led up into the throne-room, where 
once the captive reigned as a king. Many a sin- 
ning soul, coming to itself, its dull, low ache 
changed to a sharp and active pain, has felt the 
need of some such Saviour as the Christ of the 
Gospels — has looked that way, by a sort of pro- 
phetic instinct, for relief. And this need has 
opened the soul for the further experience, that 
of the Christ-consciousness. As with the sense 
of God, so with this sense of a present Christ, 
some good men have hesitated to own its direct- 
ness, inquiring, whether this sense of a Saviour 
may not best be regarded as a deduction from the 
fact of a conscious salvation. But there are thou- 
sands of careful men, who are accurate in their 
language, and who claim to have come to know 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 167 

Jesus by the nimblest and surest of all logic — 
that of the heart. Like a flash, the real worth 
and work of Christ have come to them, and with 
these a sense of them as connected with him. 
The heart saw it before the head. It felt out the 
fact. For the sense of relief from sin through 
a person, Jesus Christ, has been borne in to the 
soul, so that he who was a mere name, the Christ 
of eighteen hundred years ago, has come to one's 
own heart as the present Saviour. It is not the 
sense of some blind, causeless deliverance, but it 
stands in connection with a personal Deliverer. 
And before the man is aware of it, before it 
comes up as a recognized fact to the logical con- 
sciousness, the heart has been paying divine hon- 
ors to the Son ; and it rejoices, when it becomes 
aware of what the feeling involves as to the di- 
vinity of the Lord, that it has his permission to 
honor the Son even as one honors the Father. 
Probably millions of Christian souls, speaking 
directly out of their personal consciousness, and 
before they could stop to cool the feeling by run- 



168 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

ning it in any set mould of careful speech, have 
used to some Christian friend the phrase, " I have 
found Christ." That is just what it was to their 
feeling. Is it not just what it was to the ob- 
jective fact? So Paul put it: "It pleased God 
to reveal his Son in me." It was just as true, as 
he elsewhere states it, that the revelation was to 
him. There were objective facts as well as a sub- 
jective process in his conversion. He tells his 
experience both ways, as do most devout Chris- 
tians, to whom there is the equal phrase, " I came 
to Christ " and " Christ came to me." 

It is a curious fact — and one of which on the 
principles of mere naturalism no account can be 
given — that the extremes of human society furnish 
us with examples of this same Christ-consciousness. 
There is no need of citation from men who have 
led the thought of the church and the world. 
But an example from the other extreme may not 
be amiss. Mr. Bushnell, in bis Nature and the 
Supernatural, tells us of a person hardly reck- 
oned as " bright," a notorious drunkard and dis- 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 169 

gustingly profane, who was so reached, and so 
permanently reached, by divine influences that he 
was the wonder of all who knew him. He 
spelled out texts in the Bible, he prayed ; he was 
a thoroughly changed man. Asked about it, he 
had only one answer, " Why, I have seen Jesus/' 
Sceptic might sneer and doubter wonder, but the 
fact stood just the same, of a permanent moral 
reformation in a man who could scarce take in 
intellectually the outline of the Christian ideas. 
But they somehow took possession of his whole 
heart; and his explanation of the phenomena 
will stand till some one can show a better : " Why, 
I have seen Jesus." And as with all classes, so 
with all Christian centuries. From our own time, 
when men- talk of "finding Christ," back to 
Paul's time, it is the same — he saying, in the name 
of the Christian consciousness of his age, " God 
hath shined in our hearts in the face of Jesus 
Christ^ 

To some men there is a more especial sense 
of the leading of the Holy Spirit. To them the 

15 



170 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

prominent thing is this movement of their interior 
moral nature, which they are certain is not self 
caused. Something — further on they say, some 
one — has strangely stirred them. They could not 
have reversed their natures. It was no case of 
their throttling the bad in them till it died ; no 
case of their working themselves up into a new 
character; no case in which they had gradually 
diminished the bad unspiritual development by a 
counter-development; but some other power was 
there — a supernatural factor entered into the 
account. In such cases, though the logical 
inference may be drawn, often the loving dis- 
ciple of the heart outruns the lagging servant 
of the head, and testifies that "the Spirit wit- 
nesses with our spirit" — the divine in the hu- 
man consciousness— " that we are the children 
of God." 

And the same man, at different places in his 
experience of religion, shall be found to be exer- 
cised by each of these views in turn. There will 
be hours — and sometimes they will become days 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 171 

and months — when the perception of God as 
Father is intense. The chief truth of religion 
seems to be the Divine Fatherhood. Jesus Christ 
is indeed the way, as the Holy Spirit is the guide, 
to God. But God himself is the end and all. He, 
in the serene and awful splendor of his attributes 
and the glory of his perfections, fills up all the 
horizon, and there is scarce room for a star in the 
same heavens with this sun. There is such a vir- 
tue as Godliness. It is the sense, the pervasive 
sense, of God. His omniscience is no more a 
name. The God who searches the heavens is also 
searching the depths of one's soul. There is sol- 
emn hush before him. The soul rises, and then 
bows itself to its God. His grandeur does not 
i affright. There is almost the sense of being at 
home with this great God. One gets at the mean- 
ing of the Scripture which declares, that he who 
inhabits the high and lofty place will also dwell 
with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit. 
There is a sense of revelation, as if God were 
opening the eyes of the soul to see, and as if he 



172 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

would reveal himself as peculiarly "our God." We 
seem to go beyond his promises and his declara- 
tions, and to be allowed to come to himself. Can 
it be delusive, that feeling of devout souls when 
in some moments they feel that they are " near to 
God"? Must there not be an objective fact to 
match this subjective consciousness? 

Nor are such hours those of excited feeling; on 
the contrary, they are among the calmest and 
steadiest moments we ever know. They are the 
best moral moods, in which we would seem to be 
most capable of judging of the feelings which pos- 
sess us. The mind is singularly restful and well 
poised. In no possible state is its judgment more 
evenly balanced; nor can we receive under any 
imagined circumstances in all our life its composed 
and careful verdict with more certainty. We find 
our consciousness at its clearest vision. All the 
great Christian biographies, from Augustine to 
Jonathan Edwards, record such experiences, de- 
scribing them as divine manifestations; these 
loftiest men employing words which involve the 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 173 

idea of the direct apprehension of God in these 
most exalted and yet calmest hours.* 

The thick -leaved volumes of Christian expe- 
rience have also records of more ecstatic emotion, 
which, in their way and for another purpose, are 
as valuable as are those of more serene and even 
souls. Gathering sometimes about God the Fa- 
ther, they more frequently rise into the experiences 
which come from faith in Christ as one's Saviour. 
They are not only the strong excitements of a 
devout soul over the loveliness of infinite right- 
eousness, but there is personal love toward a Per- 
son " altogether lovely," who is " Jesus Christ the 
Righteous." Bunyan's Grace Abounding and 
Rutherford's Letters are well-known specimens of 
this personal affectionateness. Bunyan is a puzzle 
to doubters. It will not do to call him a fool 

* Augustine, A Kempis, Pascal, Fenelon, Luther, Henry 
Martyn, and Kutherford are men who make, repeatedly, the 
claim, in one form or another, of Leighton, when he speaks 
of " the sensible presence of God and the shining of his clear- 
discovered face upon them." 
15* 



174 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

when he is ranked by Macaulay as one of the fore- 
most minds of his century. To those who recog- 
nize the facts of Christian experience he is a man 
sorely tempted and cast down, but often suddenly 
lifted up to " wonderful heights ;" with an intense 
spiritual hunger, and sometimes fed, as he quaint- 
ly puts it, "with honey from the rock;" a man 
with many dark hours, yet sometimes having 
"very sweet apprehensions when God revealed 
his Son unto me." And as to Rutherford, his 
spiritual life seems to be modelled upon Solomon's 
Song. He knew almost what it was to abandon 
himself to Jesus Christ. The imagery he uses 
would be dangerous to coarser souls ; but nothing 
less glowing than the words of Oriental passion- 
ateness found in the Song could convey that sense 
of personal affection, and delight, and self-surren- 
der, which he felt toward a present Christ. The 
language is sensuous, but not sensual. It is such 
as would be employed if one had looked with his 
own eyes into the eyes of Christ, and had felt, in 
the days of Christ's flesh, the touch of his hand. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 175 

When we have made every possible allowance for 
such language, there will still remain this fact 
beneath it all, that Rutherford, and thousands of 
others who are one with him in this thing, have 
striven in this way to express a consciousness of 
the nearness which comes from a direct revelation 
of Jesus Christ to" the human soul. 

The testimony to the presence of the Holy 
Spirit is also manifold and positive. The witness 
of Paul and Luther and Knox and Edwards, and 
indeed of the whole church of God, deserves the 
notice of those who are ready to listen to human 
testimony where it is worth the most. Let it be, 
in this question of the direct witness of the Holy 
Spirit, as in that about the consciousness of God 
or of Christ, that there are some who make it a 
matter of inference rather than of consciousness ; 
let it be that some would rather say that, because 
of such and such feelings, they draw the sure con- 
clusion that God and Christ and the Holy Spirit 
are actually near, and are a veritable presence. 
That some call an inference what others call a 



176 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

consciousness is not strange. For they who speak 
of the inference admit that this inference is always 
bordering upon a consciousness, this bud always 
ready to burst into a flower, and that it will al- 
ways be a direct consciousness in the heavenly 
state ; while those who claim a present con- 
sciousness are very ready to own that this primary 
moral perception becomes in turn a matter to be 
examined by the logical faculty. In either way 
of statement we shall get a powerful confirmation, 
in Christian experience, to the being and holiness 
of God, to the beauty and glory of Jesus Christ, 
and to the comforting power of the Holy Spirit. 
And, this end secured, those who speak of this as 
a consciousness are not to be denounced as lacking 
in carefulness ; nor yet are those who claim that 
the experience gives only the sure data for a sure 
inference to be regarded as lacking in experimental 
knowledge of divine things. Mr. Bushnell has 
left on record his conviction as to the direct con- 
sciousness. He writes : " Thus everything is made 
ready for the best advances in religious experience. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 177 

For there is a close relation, scarcely different 
from identity, between faith and what is called 
experience ; and both are terms that have a fixed 
reference to the fact, that Christ and Christianity 
are supernatural bestowments. When he is so 
received or appropriated, he is, of course, expe- 
rienced or known by experiment ; in that manner 
verified : he that believeth hath the witness in 
himself. The manner, therefore, of this divine 
experience, called faith, is strictly Baconian. And 
the result is an experimental knowledge of God, 
or an experimental acquaintance with God in 
the reception of his supernatural communica- 
tions ; which knowledge, again, or acquaintance, 
is in fact a revelation within, a divine manifesta- 
tion, a restored consciousness of God. In such a 
participation of God we are lifted, empowered, 
assimilated, or finally glorified." * All of which 
is but the development of those words of the 
apostle in which Christians are said to be " par- 
takers of the divine nature." And, God having 

* Nature and the Supernatural, page 521. 
M 



178 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

been apprehended, what says the religious experi- 
ence about the human soul which thus finds him ? 
The two fundamental facts which make religion 
alike a possibility and a necessity are an eternal 
God and an immortal soul. In Christian discus- 
sions on psychology, the attempt is made to show 
that thought is not the physical product of phys- 
ical force. The best analysis finds no one quality 
of matter in mind or of mind in matter, and no 
substance common to both. The ordinary forms 
of consciousness find power as an ultimate fact, 
not of matter, but of mind. We know that we 
are, and we are conscious of force as from within. 
The soul knows that it is a single and separate 
self; knows itself also as originating courses of 
thought ; knows itself as having properties that it 
does not recognize as existing in matter, but as be- 
longing to mind. And more: the kind of soul 
involved is not an animal soul, but a rational soul, 
and one capable of moral activity — capable of 
taking in the ideas of right and of wrong, of duty 
and of God. It is by no means necessary that 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 179 

these moral ideas shall be largely developed, in 
order to show what kind of a soul we possess. 
The capacity, under the best training, to take in 
these ideas is all that can be safely claimed. That 
man can be taught in these respects, and that our 
religious words can be filled out with meaning by 
tuition, is owned by all, thus proving capacity. 
Men can be taught to worship, but no beast to 
pray. The germ is there, and man's capacity, 
under any circumstances, to take in moral ideas is 
proof of a kind of soul that is not a swine-soul 
or ape-soul, but a human soul, with God ward tend- 
encies, even in every most depraved man of all 
the race. 

That these ideas should be rude, elementary, 
and often dormant, especially in the uncultivated 
ages and nations, is what might be expected. 
That the action of this moral nature should be 
fickle, uncertain, sometimes perverted, exactly 
accords with the scriptural doctrine of the fall, 
and the scriptural declarations of man's condition 
as a sinner. Milton's fallen angel had somewhat 



180 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

of the original glory, "but obscured." The vol- 
untary nature, which is in the passions and will, 
can greatly hinder the workings of the ethical 
nature, which exists in the better reason and con- 
science. When we find our human nature in this 
fallen state, let us not stop to study it with refer- 
ence to its capacity. As in natural phenomena 
there are unfavorable conditions, in which forces 
work at a disadvantage, so it is in spiritual things. 
We study no phenomenon in the outward world 
at its worst if we can get it at its best. We do 
not study the laws of motion when a body is at 
rest, nor of light at midnight, nor of heat in winter, 
nor of magnetism when unexcited, nor of gravity 
in the inert rock ; albeit there is something about 
motion to be learned in repose, of light in shad- 
ows, of heat in polar . circles, of gravity in the 
unmoved stone. We do not, when we would 
prove man a reasoning creature, select the worst 
specimens of logic in human literature; nor, when 
we would show in him capacity for music, do we 
take our example from those in savage life, nor 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 181 

even from the dumb mutes occasionally found in 
civilized lands. We study things at their best. 
Let us do the same with the human soul, finding 
the best proofs that it is, in the best specimens of 
what it is and what it does. 

Never is the soul so manifestly and grandly 
and undoubtedly a soul as in the Christian ex- 
perience. The soul shows what it is by what it 
does. It treads the highest circles of spiritual 
activity. It ranges there among the highest 
things. The man is in the loftiest possible 
moods, and is doing in these moral heights his 
best possible work. So obvious is this, that the 
early experiences of religion are called "caring 
for the soul," by a good many plain people ; and 
the phrase, like so many other homely phrases in 
the household language of religion, is worthy of 
study. The truth is, that the soul as a soul has 
ordinarily little care among men. It is used for 
the body, used in common concerns, used man- 
ward in social life, used worldward in securing 
knowledge of material things. But the moment 

16 



182 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

it begins to be used Godward, the man comes to 
feel, as he himself calls it, "the worth of the 
soul." To use it in this noble way is almost as 
if a man had discovered a new thing of priceless 
value, that he had not before noticed among his 
possessions. He is a grander being than he had 
thought. He can look Godward. For he begins 
to be aware that he was made in God's image. 
There must, he says, be no carelessness about " the 
concerns of an immortal soul." Reason does, in- 
deed, give us the fact of the soul, finding it as an 
inference; but Christian experience gives it di- 
rectly out of one's unmistakable consciousness. In 
this way we come at once upon the soul, and find 
ourselves using it as freely and commonly as men 
use the plentiful sunlight. We seem to be tread- 
ing securely among these great moral verities, one 
of which is the soul itself, with the same certainty 
and precision as we experience when walking on 
the material earth, breathing in the material air, 
and acting amid the material objects which we 
use in our common employments. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 183 

The immortality of this soul is assumed in the 
fact of its continually increasing responsibility. 
To-day's soul-life is a result, in part, of all the 
yesterdays we have lived, and we shall never reach 
a point where there will be no to-morrow needed. 
The moral results of all previous days will de- 
mand always another day. A moral being origi- 
nates always that which requires an eternity for 
its completion. And here we come upon a re- 
markable confirmation of the scriptural view of 
immortality. In the Bible, we never find a bald, 
bare, blank, characterless immortality, like that 
which is given us as the result of purely logical 
processes. The immortality it shows us has a 
moral significance. The things which are im- 
mortal are the moral distinctions and the moral 
states. Their immortality carries, necessarily, with 
it the immortality of the soul that is to endure 
amid these distinctions, and in one or the other of 
these two eternal states. It would be hard to find 
a text in the Bible that treats of the bare immor- 
tality of the human soul. It is the moral cha- 



184 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

racter of souls that is immortal in the Scriptures. 
And this is precisely the confirmation which Chris- 
tian experience furnishes, putting, as it does, that 
emphasis on the character which involves the 
soul's immortality. 

There is here also a confirmation of the bibli- 
cal requirement of repentance. Given an eternal 
God, whose whole being and activity make for 
righteousness ; and given, also, an immortal soul 
that has in itself the sense of its own unrighteous- 
ness, — and one or the other must change if they 
are to dwell together in harmony and heaven. 
Man must turn away from his sin. For that is 
the exact meaning of "repentance" in the Bible. 
It is the turning of the mind from the wrong and 
toward the right. That it is always accompanied 
with sorrow is ? a necessary fact. But the radical 
thing is the change of one's mind Godward. For 
the command is not arbitrary, but it lies in the 
nature of things. Your disobedient child needs, 
for his own good, to be sorry for his act before he 
receives your word of forgiveness. And you need 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 185 

to know of his repentance before you can feel to- 
ward him as you do when he acknowledges his 
wrong. There is a natural necessity, alike in him 
and in you, for his regret in wronging you. The 
requirement is exactly what the mind expects, and 
obedience to it is a gratification. There is a lux- 
ury in the lowliness of penitence, and there is no 
saltness in its tears. The relief of confession to 
man, it may be, is only equalled by the satisfac- 
tion that arises in the divine mind. "Verily, I 
say unto you, There is joy in the presence of the 
angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." 

Nor is there less confirmation of the scriptural 
demand {or faith. For, given the need of pardon 
for sin, and given also a promise of it, then faith 
is the soul's extended hand as it grasps the decla- 
ration of its God. In this way the old-time con- 
fidence and trust, which are the bond of all lofty 
spirits, and in which stands our union with God, 
are restored to us. Made to believe, we are sure 
there is, likewise, something to be believed. Says 
Phillips Brooks : "There are deep satisfactions in 

16 * 



186 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

the belief in God. Intellect and heart crave him. 
When the intellect in its best exercises and the 
heart in its best moods crave God, he must be, or 
we are made up with a right and righteous desire 
that will be a consuming agony unless its aspira- 
tions can find an eternal gratification in him. The 
longing for righteousness within goes out in search 
of the Holy One. The fervent outgoing of the 
best souls in their best moments is a factor that 
compels another factor, even God. And the prac- 
tical Christian living has satisfactions, which one 
is slow to believe unfounded, in the conviction 
that it finds refuge in God." 

This exercise of a soul in penitence and in faith 
is something so new and so unlike all worldly ex- 
perience, that we instinctively ask for the cause 
of it. How comes a man to use himself in this 
new way toward God? Deep as are these ex- 
ercises, there must be a deeper reason for them. 
And that reason is the verification of the Scrip- 
ture doctrine of regeneration. Christian experi- 
ence says that it found the work needed in the 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 187 

soul to be not one of repair, but of reconstruc- 
tion — not the furnishing of a new stick of timber 
here and there, but the taking down and the re- 
building of the entire edifice. The change need- 
ed was not of degree, but of kind. The trouble 
was in the central principle about which the in- 
ward life was organized. The core was defective. 
The germ-principle, out of which all should grow, 
was not right, and so nothing was really right. 
For right was seen to have more than the mere 
conventional sense of the word. It was not a 
social or a civil word only, but a moral word, 
with heart in it. And there was the defect of 
the soul in the old days of the unregenerate life. 
There had been separate impulses to right, but 
they had been fitful and irregular, never coming 
from the depths within. There were separate acts, 
that would have been recognized as righteousness, 
had they come up spontaneously from a free and 
loving heart. The wrong was from within. The 
right was not only not there, but the man felt his 
impotence to put it there. No number of duties 



188 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

done before conscience could generate one heart- 
throb of love. But love was the very first thing 
needed. It must be the seed-principle out of 
which all true growth was to come. And it is 
the consciousness of Christians that this new thing, 
the central germ of all else required, has been 
given of God. The soul is centrally and divine- 
ly changed. And this is a direct confirmation 
of a whole class of scriptural texts. The Bible 
speaks of being "bora again" — "born of the 
Spirit" and "born of God." These phrases in- 
volve so much, when given their obvious meaning, 
that one might be tempted to ask whether some 
other and lower thing was not intended, if the 
plain sense of them were not abundantly con- 
firmed by the most profound consciousness of so 
many devout men. Their experience simply fills 
out that wonderful scriptural language. It is 
proved to be true in the deepest and surest of all 
possible confirmations. The fact of a supernat- 
ural Christ agrees well with the doctrine of a 
supernatural regeneration ; and if the one rests 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 189 

on historic evidence, as it should, the other 
none the less properly rests upon a fitting basis, 
an agreement in the Christian consciousness, and 
so in the Christian testimony of the Christian 
centuries. 

And just here come into view the most delight- 
ful confirmations of the biblical doctrine of the 
atonement There must have been a reason which 
determined the Divine Being to do his regen- 
erating work on the human soul. There were 
reasons why he should not do it. And the soul, 
divinely taught to be just, sees that there must 
have been obstacles in the divine mind and gov- 
ernment to granting any such mercy; obstacles, 
too, there are in such a human mind to receiving 
such mercy, unless in some way taught that the 
interests of righteousness will not thereby suffer. 
In these highest ethical moments a salvation by 
any sacrifice of justice is felt to be undesirable, 
even if it were possible. " I do not want God to 
be unjust in saving me/' said one who was in- 
quiring the way of salvation. There are feelings 



190 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

in the ethical nature of man that require satisfac- 
tion. In correspondence with these, there must 
be also feelings in the ethical nature of God that 
require satisfaction. The atonement, defined not 
in dialectic language, but in that of Christian ex- 
perience, is that work of Jesus Christ that meets 
this double want. On God's part, the satisfactions 
are those due to righteousness; on man's part, 
those due to sin. A man in his highest ethical 
moments is anxious about the interests of right- 
eousness ; and if he can see that these are cared 
for in the case of our debts of doom, he will be 
ready to believe that the claims of holiness are 
not sacrificed in the divine mind, even when the 
sinner is treated as if he had not been a sinner. 
Something, the soul sees, is done about meeting 
one side of this double ethical want. We may 
not see how, in all respects, the atonement meets 
the case. But one only needs to see that the 
want is recognized, and that it is proposed in this 
way to meet it. Sin is adjudged, in the Bible 
and in the soul's experience, to be worthy of death. 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 191 

It is the deadly thing. The death of Christ is 
represented as the death or the penalty of those 
who were doomed to die. And this scriptural 
representation exactly meets the feeling that our 
awakened ethical nature desired to see met. The 
soul, finding this an adequate satisfaction to its 
own wants, can the more easily credit the fact, that 
there is an acceptableness to the ethical nature of 
God in the work of " him whom God hath set 
forth as a propitiation." And a man rejoices, 
with the rejoicing of righteousness, that God's 
plan is arranged so that "he may be just and 
the justifier of him that believeth." 

And there is a very remarkable confirmation 
of the Bible as the word of God in this Christian 
experience, find it where you will. Child or phil- 
osopher, ignorant or learned, the convert may be, 
but he turns instinctively to this book, as child 
to mother's breast. He has a kind of natural 
knowledge that the handwriting within is a tran- 
script of that without, on the sacred page. He 
knows where are the pleasant pastures and the 



192 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

cooling streams. There is a peculiar lock, and 
he has the combinations that open these treasures. 
Of course, there are whole sections of the Bible 
that can only be understood by him who has the 
broadest geographical, historic, and exegetical 
knowledge: not even then are all its treasures 
yielded. A Newton must bow in wonder before 
mysteries which only eternal study, in the light 
of the countenance of God, can disclose. But 
there runs through these most difficult portions 
a golden thread, and the convert sees it. There is 
everywhere an aroma, and the spiritual soul in- 
hales it ; a peculiar flush of color, and the newly- 
changed soul detects it in every look ; a throb of 
a new life, and this man catches the heart-beat, 
and finds another within, that keeps time and tune 
with the heart of God himself. It is a wonderful 
thing to notice how quickly those thick clouds of 
doubt that had hung over the mind depart from 
the sky when the soul in which they were born 
has ceased to exhale them. The sympathetic heart 
finds fewer difficulties, and desires to see them in 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 108 

the best light; whereas the old nature made the 
worst of them, and was not altogether without 
gladness that it could find so many objections. 
In this new moral state, the Bible is one's own 
book. It is read and appropriated. It is God's 
message, and there is no mood when the soul does 
not hear some utterance that meets its needs. And 
the very historic books, in which the moral in- 
struction is secondary, become a source of spiritual 
help. For the quickened soul sees that the gen- 
eral principles on which God deals with the na- 
tions are those which he uses with individuals ; 
and all sacred history becomes a series of divine 
object-lessons, the teaching of which is plain even 
w T hen some of the historic details are not fully 
understood. And in this way there is a general 
endorsement of all the facts of the sacred story. 
It is not, of course, claimed that by any Christian 
consciousness we can decide infallibly on the gen- 
uineness of the narrative of a particular event — say 
the feeding of the three thousand. But that mir- 
acle is seen to have a better cause than that of 

17 N 



194 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

satisfying physical hunger, to be one altogether in 
harmony with the purposes of our Lord, to be in- 
structive in its moral bearings, to be along the 
line of the expected divine working, to befit the 
idea of a perfect Christ. A heart divinely fed 
with " the bread which cometh down from heav- 
en" has a preparation, a peculiar readiness, to 
receive these facts — a sort of quick instinct, that 
sees what is befitting; and it holds the grain all 
the more surely, because it sees how the chaff of 
pretended and unsympathetic miracle " is driven 
away." The purified eye sees in this Bible, as in 
its counterpart the renewed soul, a life, and so a 
thing that is not mechanically built, with certain 
parts which are not at all essential ; but a life, the 
principle and the result of which is a growth in- 
volving every part of it. In it there is a kind of 
vital force about which it all gathers naturally. 
Each book differs in style, in purpose, in traits 
of authorship. Everywhere we have a few prom- 
inent thoughts, which, after all, are but restate- 
ments of one great idea, that of "God manifest 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 195 

in the flesh " as man's " Saviour." As in some 
skilfully-arranged musical composition you have 
often a single theme, a simple movement, and this 
worked out in many variations — now in the major 
and now in the minor key, here as a tender song, 
there as a grand march, in one place the idea 
faintly hinted, in another expressed in sharpest 
phrase ; but always, whatever the number and 
character of the variations, the same theme, — 
so, under all varieties of moral movement in the 
Bible, the quick and sympathetic ear detects the 
great thought, the " unwearied idea of God's prov- 
idence and word," as he is ever bringing out the 
harmonies of human redemption. 

And the lofty righteousness of the Bible is rec- 
ognized in Christian experience. The book finds 
us at greater depths than any other. It sinks 
shafts that go down all through the strata of the 
soul till they find the primitive rock. It shows 
us to ourselves. It plucks off all disguises and 
evasions. It knows man. Its high — one might 
almost say its severe — standards of righteousness 



196 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

at first affright and convict us. But this solemn 
fear and awe before commandments which are a 
transcript of the divine nature becomes, at length, 
singularly attractive, and even lovely. The Book 
tones up one's moral convictions, and they, in 
turn, recognize more distinctly and identify more 
perfectly the Book as written in that moral lan- 
guage which bespeaks its divine origin. The 
Book has an atmosphere, and there are those 
who find the bracing air of these higher moral 
altitudes exceeding enjoyable. They get above 
certain mists when they go up into these moun- 
tain-tops of revelation. The sights and sounds 
about them when alone with these things are 
such as wicked men could not enjoy, and such as 
they themselves, in their former state, would not 
have found attractive. They find, in their best 
moral moods, that the Book always leads them to 
greater heights, and exhibits to them, more and 
more, the charm of a perfect moral beauty — the 
beauty of righteousness. Its whole influence on us 
is in the interest of holiness ; and our loftiest moral 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 197 

moods and aspirations are those in which the moral 
judgment most heartily approves the truths of 
the Bible. In hours of most fervent prayer, and 
equally in those of most careful study, the con- 
viction grows upon Christians, that they may 
safely trust their immortal interests upon its 
promises. The word of God thus becomes a part 
of one's self, its truths entering into our most 
sure and satisfactory experiences. 

Such a soul comes, at length, to see and admire 
God's method in the Bible. It is seen to be one 
the advantages of which outweigh every other 
possible method. It is no dull, flat Chinese pic- 
ture, no merely preceptive or oracular or didactic 
volume. But God's great method of revelation is 
seen to be wide enough to include all the events of 
ancient history, as far as they illustrate the moral 
truths, which such a book should teach; to in- 
clude the story of the beginnings of the world and 
the story of the primal sin and the primal prom- 
ise; to include sketches of the men who were 

especial forerunners of the one great Man to be 
17* 



198 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

born in the fulness of time; to include any spe- 
cial revelations to such men in epochs of the per- 
sonal or the national life ; to include the one great 
moral law, given amid the most impressive cir- 
cumstances, and at a fitting time and place; to 
include a ceremonial law that should provide the 
world with religious language, so that at length 
all men could understand its terms ; to include 
prophecies from holy souls at the hours when 
men's ears ached from the awful silence, because 
God seemed to have deserted the world ; to in- 
clude songs from Hebrew singers, who voiced the 
devotional feeling of all the centuries; to include 
the proverbial utterances of sanctified wisdom ; 
to include biographical sketches so vivid, so truly 
artistic in their simple and hearty appreciation of 
the life recorded, that they are at once models of 
all narration and mirrors of the Incarnate Son ; 
to include epistles, in which brotherliness can 
remind of old and acknowledged truths, or can 
declare afresh the utterances of a risen Lord ; to 
include, finally, peculiar descriptions of the grand 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 199 

future of the kingdom of God on earth, as the in- 
spired vision of it rose upon the soul of the dis- 
ciple on Patmos. And the man gets experience, 
as he appropriates to himself now this and now 
that part of the varied form of scriptural story, 
that the volume is no cunningly devised fable, 
but is the "word of God." 



CHAPTER VI. 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AS A PROPHECY. 

When I open the Four Gospels, I find on 
almost every page a narrative of miracles. They 
were always supernatural, but never unnatural, 
events. There was nothing like the freak of 
mere power, nothing wrought for the sake of 
wonder. All was done in the interests of mercy 
and justice and righteousness. No lack of wis- 
dom was ever alleged ; no recklessness of personal 
ambition, like that told in the fables of heathen 
gods, was ever ascribed to him who wrought them. 
Jesus the man bore himself calmly, in wise re- 
straint — never doing his wonders too freely, nor 
yet too scantily; holding infinite power in such 
carefulness and employing it so nobly, that we 
accept his miracles as the fit things from him. 

Those miracles covered a vast range. They 
200 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 201 

showed him, here, potent over nature ; there, po- 
tent over the evil world ; and, yet further on, 
laying commands upon the heavenly world which 
its dwellers acknowledged and obeyed. He heal- 
ed the sick, touched blind eyes into sight, and at 
his word the dead came forth to life. 

As I read of these things, as I gaze on these 
great word-pictures until they live and breathe 
before the eye, how natural the inquiries which 
arise in my heart ! — u Are there any such things 
done now ? Are there signs and wonders wrought 
in God for us to-day? Instead of going back 
eighteen hundred years for proof, can we not find 
fresh evidence for our own age and for our own 
hearts?" If the points made in the previous 
chapters, of our argument are well taken, then the 
answer is at hand. The fresh evidence is found 
in the Christian experience. This takes the place 
of the old miracles. It more than takes their 
place, for it serves a better purpose than they. 
The miracles pointed to this. They were intro- 
ductory to this. He who wrought them said, that 



202 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

the miracles would be withdrawn in favor of 
something " greater than these." This is great er, 
in that it is wrought on souls, rather than on 
bodies — in the spiritual, rather than in the ma- 
terial, realm. This is wrought also by a greater 
measure of power, and its results abide for ever, 
while the fires of the last day shall blot out every 
trace of physical miracle. This transformation is 
the perpetual miracle of Christianity — a miracle 
more grand, because a moral miracle wrought 
on souls, and a further step in the progress of 
God's revelation to man. But these spiritual 
"signs and wonders wrought in God" are, in 
turn, prophetic of " greater things than these." 
They demand a future, and they foretell both the 
fact and the kind of the future which awaits the 
man in whom the good work has begun. 

The Christian experience is a prophecy of a 
future life. That future life we do not see, and 
to it we have not come, and of it we can have as 
yet no direct experience. It is not in our con- 
sciousness. But we are conscious of a beginning 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 203 

that craves an ending; of a cause that must have 
a result ; of being acted upon by powers from out 
of the other world, that work in the way of prepa- 
ration for the world from which they came. It is 
more than a common hope, for it is a sympathetic 
expectation. It stands not on logical inference 
alone. It does not find its basis in mere natural 
religion. It makes little of these, until one, by 
Christian experience, has gained a normal clear- 
ness of insight. But it is not an unreasoning be- 
lief. The soul has its methods of insight and 
prophecy. It feels that it must have an eternity 
to carry out these beginnings. It craves always 
longer time to get the full results. There is im- 
perfection, because incompleteness, in all things 
here. Yet the craving for a perfect heaven is 
stronger because of the present state. We see 
just enough of its perfect brightness to be dis- 
satisfied with our darkness, and to be very sure 
that, a perfect vision gained by and by, we shall 
look in upon a perfect heaven. These flowers say 
there is a heaven by their beauty ; those wastes, 



204 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

by their barrenness. What we experience of re- 
ligion* in one way, and what we experience of sin 
in another, demand equally a perfect heaven. Rest 
says it by likeness; toil says it by contrast. All 
our ideas 'of it make it a happy place, since an 
unhappy heaven is a contradiction alike to thought 
and feeling. Hence every figure of beauty and 
grandeur is used in the Bible to express the satis- 
faction which Christian experience craves and ex- 
pects in its heaven. The figures are Oriental in 
their color, for the penmen of the Bible were 
Orientals. But Christian experience does not 
stop a moment on these externals. They are 
merely the gilded ornaments — fit and beautiful 
indeed, but only ornaments — upon the frame of 
the real picture. They are the sculptured portal 
to the temple. They are the carved staircase and 
splendid outer hall through which we pass ; all 
things preparing us for presentation to royalty it- 
self. In the realm of secular education, the child 
is past all teaching who needs to be told that, in the 
fable where beast and bird are said to speak, the 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 205 

representation is made, in order to teach a truth 
more forcibly than if the words were put into 
human lips. The heart taught of God will never 
stop on the mere figures of speech, but will al- 
ways go on to the grand realities they prepare 
us to accept. The expectant heart never mistakes 
the figure for the fact. It has its key to all these 
representations. The sensuous is not the sensual. 
When, in any man, the spiritual rules the mental 
and the physical, the wonderful .imagery of the 
harp and the crowns, and the golden streets and 
the gates of pearl, are taken up and used, often 
by uncultured souls, without one thought of the 
material figure. Such souls go beyond that. The 
thought in the heart is expressed very wonderful- 
ly by these words of Eastern metaphor. And so, 
by quick insight of the spiritual mind, they have 
discovered the true significance and use of figura- 
tive words. 

All this includes the idea of heaven as a holy 
place. The quality of the heavenly joy is holy. 
The hind of heaven conceived by the Christian 

18 



206 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

experience differs widely from every other found 
in all the literature of the future life. Man's 
heaven is always, in part, a projection of himself. 
And this acknowledged fact has provoked a sneer. 
And we have been asked how we know that the 
Christian heaven is any more real than any other 
heaven in which men have believed. We meet 
the question triumphantly. We are not drawing 
on the imagination. We have something actual 
and tangible to show as a reason for our hope. 
Here is a peculiar fact : that the deepest of all 
forms of consciousness, the Christian experience, 
is preparation and prophecy, is warranty and en- 
dorsement of it. And, over and above this evi- 
dence, we have the testimony of God as to his 
own peculiar heaven, the very idea of which car- 
ries its own evidence, as sunbeams are evidence 
of the sun. Not on fancy do we rest, but on the 
surest possible of all convictions — on the granite 
base of the soul's prophetic experiences at its 
most central and normal moments, and in its best 
activities, and where its consciousness is more 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 207 

trustworthy than anywhere else. We get our 
proof of spiritual truth likewise from a series 
of facts that, in our Bible, come into actual his- 
tory. It is certain, on historic grounds, that the 
supernatural Christ has lived ; that he has uttered 
truths which, under the Spirit's power, produce 
this religious experience that craves this kind of 
heaven, that is prophetic of it, that involves it as 
a place for the development of the work already 
begun. And thus the word on the printed page 
confirms the word experienced in the heart ; and 
both, with reference to the future, are present, liv- 
ing, objective facts, that declare the reality of a 
holy heaven. And when it is said, by way of 
objection, that the projection of self is the heaven 
of man, it remains to be asked, of what man it is 
a projection. If of a wicked and worldly man, 
we grant it. Only, in that case, the projection 
of self, in the clear light of eternity, will bring a 
heaven that is really a hell ; while the projection 
of the holy self in the believing heart will be 
just that heaven promised in the Bible — that 



208 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

heaven of which Christian experience is alike 
preparatory and prophetic. 

And in another way these prophecies are 
awakened in the believing soul. There is a sense 
of heirship. There is the story of a certain 
prince, carried off in childhood from the palace 
and placed in a fisherman's hut, where he was to 
be reared in profound ignorance of his parentage. 
But, as the child grew, all who saw him felt that 
he was no rude fisher's boy. Even to himself 
there were singular revelations. There was a 
dim memory, which was hardly a memory, of some- 
thing different, as though he had been at some 
time in another sphere; and there were strange 
plans of what he would be likely to do were he 
high-born and gently bred. So, in us as men, 
there is a far-off and indistinct race-memory, as 
of something other, better, nobler, purer. The 
Eden-state w T e never saw r , and of it we can have 
no personal memory. But when we come to our- 
selves in conversion, the feeling is that of resto- 
ration to something almost recalled, and yet it is 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 209 

not quite remembered — as if there were in us all 
a lingering race-memory. And the new feeling 
is also that of return to an old relationship. The 
prodigal has come back to his home in the Father's 
house. Old objects greet his eye, and now he 
recalls it, that he saw them before he went away 
in the exile of sin. Related to the Father, the 
child is heir. The inheritance comes in the line 
of relationship. And, since God is one's recon- 
ciled " Father in heaven/' the heirship is estab- 
lished, and the heavenly inheritance is the family 
patrimony. The new heirship stands in a re- 
stored natural relation — stands also in a divine 
adoption to a higher position than that once for- 
feited. And the devout consciousness of believers 
connects these higher expectations with Christ. 
And so we are prepared to read that we are " heirs 
of God and joint heirs" — not, as we might have 
expected, with other men, but "joint heirs with 
Christ." It is an heirship, not only of man's old 
Eden, but of God's own heaven, through the 
double bond of humanity restored and of our 

18* 



210 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

relationship to God in Jesus Christ. The heir- 
ship stands in both the old and the new natures. 
So that a man who thinks about these things of 
Christian experience, thinks right on into the 
thought of heaven. His experience involves it, 
supposes it, takes it for granted, by a logic at 
once the most natural and forcible. Heirship is 
concerned in inheritance. Family affinity brings, 
by natural process, the brotherly consciousness 
and the fatherly benediction. A hope of heaven 
resting, not on personal desert, but upon divine 
promise, has its natural result in the heavenly 
home of the Divine Promiser. 

And heaven becomes more certainly objective 
to us when we recall the fact of an objective 
Christ, who is its light and glory and joy. Out 
of a holy, happy eternity, he came into time. An 
immortal out of the immortal world has stood 
among us mortals. He went back to his native 
home in that other world. Immortality has be- 
come visible, " brought to light," in human his- 
tory; and the overwhelming evidence of it is on 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 211 

record before the centuries. This event now so 
fully proved, it follows that, since the religious 
experience establishes new and peculiar relations 
to this being — Jesus Christ — we have, in the long- 
ing of believers to be with him where he is and 
to behold his glory, a strong prophecy of heaven 
— a prophecy, not only of its objective reality, but 
of the kind of life they live in the heavenly home. 
It is a life of increasing knowledge of Jesus 
Christ. Christian experience gathers about its 
loved and loving Saviour. It always feels that, 
while it knows him somewhat, it is at some time 
to know him better. It is getting into sympathy 
with him on more points with the added years of 
life. But it looks instinctively forward to the 
unclouded vision of him. Paul voices its long- 
ing when he says, that he presses forward that he 
may know him and the power of his resurrection. 
God's love and grace gave us the objective Christ 
— an actual person, around whom to gather our 
choicest affections. And so are awakened the 
deepest yearnings and anticipations of that expe- 



212 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

rience which will feel eternal disappointment 
away from the personal presence of him whom 
we love. 

They who object that the Christian ideas of 
heaven make it only a place for " ceaseless psalm- 
singing and perpetual prayer " do not understand 
us. To behold the ever-unfolding knowledge of 
Christ, to grow in heavenly wisdom through the 
teaching of a Saviour who promises that what we 
know not now we shall know hereafter, are the 
deepest and most vital things in our prophetic 
experiences of heaven. Who has not questions 
laid away for eternity ? Who has not perplex- 
ities which it is expected will be all cleared from 
the horizon, in the light of God, when the soul 
comes home to his heaven ? The Christian atti- 
tude is one of waiting. Waiting for what ? This 
is no abiding-place. But are we not so made up 
as to crave home ? Where can home be ? Where 
but with the holy company who surround Christ 
as he leads them to the living fountains of know- 
ledge and holiness and happiness? The soul's 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 213 

home-sickness is assuaged only when the soul gets 
home. As quaint old Herbert has it : 

" What have I left that I should stay and groan ? 
The most of me to heaven is fled ; 
My thoughts and joys are all packed up and gone, 
And for their old acquaintance plead. 
Oh, show thyself to me, 
Or take me up to thee !" 

Is heaven a state, or is it a place ? But what if it 
is both, and is the one because it is the other? 
The state is that mood or temper of soul that fits 
us for it, and the place is that spot where this 
state meets its satisfaction, and this prophecy gains 
its fulfilment. 

But this same Christian experience is also a 
prophecy of bodily resurrection. The soul has had 
its resurrection, but is still bound with the gar- 
ments of the sepulchre ; and there is need of a 
further act, in which the whole man, body and 
soul alike, shall be loosed from all that has any 
sign of death. It were only half a triumph to 
save the soul in heaven. There would be ever- 



214 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

more the feeling that sin and death had obtained 
a victory. Christ and Satan would be jointly- 
victorious — the one gaining the soul, the other 
the body. The heavenly joy in saved souls would 
contrast sadly with the ghastliness of the body in 
the dominion of the grave. It is fit that there 
should be a resurrection. It would be disappoint- 
ing to what is involved in Christian experience if 
the whole man should not be saved. It must be 
so that the body shall again live. Martha voiced 
the old longing : " I know that he shall rise again." 
Nor is there fitness only, but association. Both 
kinds of life are related ; so from the one, we pass 
naturally to the thought of the other. Separated 
in kind by that most essential of separations, 
whereby one is a thing of the soul and the other 
a thing of the body, the two are by some myste- 
rious bond united in us as dwellers on this earth. 
This mortal frame each man calls his own body. 
Soul and body have this mysterious relation, this 
indefinable kindred. If kindred, though unlike, 
here, why not there in that other world ? If one, 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 215 

why not the other, its companion, also in heaven ? 
We carry on mental processes by means of a phys- 
ical brain, the soul using the body in a sort of nat- 
ural usage. And though no man has discovered 
the link of relationship between his own body 
and his own soul, yet he knows that there is such 
a relation. It is natural, then, to expect that the 
body, the faculties of which have been trained to 
Christian usage — the body which the soul, in its 
broadest atmosphere of consciousness, feels belongs 
to itself — should have resurrection, and the whole 
man gain the heavenly triumph. 

And yet more are we assured of this, when we 
remember that the power which wrought in the 
soul for regeneration is that which is not only 
competent for working a resurrection, but is be- 
lieved by Christians to have already produced it 
in the instance of our Lord's body. The Chris- 
tian has received already a life-giving power. He 
woke once to find himself morally dead toward 
God and Christ. He started up from his old in- 
sensibility with a shudder. A new power of spir- 



216 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

itual life came to him. He claims that this was 
through a Divine Spirit. There has been wrought 
a resurrection already in his soul by a power that 
is able to work a resurrection on his body. It 
is the tendency of this Spirit to give life. The 
spiritual is prophetic of the bodily life. The 
same agency will perform the work. And the 
swift and strong logic of Paul, the apostle, con- 
nects the two acts with each other, and both with 
Christ. If we accept the common Christian faith, 
that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead by the 
life-giving power of the Spirit of God, it follows 
immediately in Paul's words : " If the Spirit of 
him who raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in 
you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall 
also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that 
dwelleth in you." The life-giving work of the 
Spirit, begun in the soul, is sure to bring another 
life-giving work in the body. Regeneration is 
resurrection in figurative name, and results in 
it as an actual fact. And Christians think they 
have one specimen case, one actual example of 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 217 

resurrection — that of their Lord. It was so illus- 
trious an instance ; it so completely filled the re- 
quirements of a resurrection ; it so answered all 
serious objections to the possibility of the resur- 
rection of any man's body ; it was so glorious an 
event; it is so certain that the body in which he 
rose from the grave was his own body, and that 
this body visibly ascended into the heavens, — that 
resurrection is assured by the prophecy and prom- 
ise thus given to all who are now followers of the 
Lord, and who are more completely to follow him 
in the resurrection of life. And so when we 
stand, in early spring-time, by the rounded sod 
that covers our departed, and mark the fresh 
verdure that comes after the winter's death, the 
regenerated nature within us and the renovated 
nature without us both utter, with new emphasis, 
that great common faith of Christendom : " I be- 
lieve in the resurrection of the dead." 

And what is the further prophecy of Christian 
experience as to a final day of deliverance, of rev- 
elation, of judgment ? The perplexities of this 



218 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

present life grow thicker as one gets the experi- 
ences of years upon him. The skein is tangled 
beyond all our power to unravel it. The things 
that seem to be wrong in the providential gov- 
ernment of the world increase upon us. The 
heart grows sad and sick in its perplexity. The 
disorder calls for some great restoring hand. The 
days are meaningless unless they are hastening to 
a coming day of the Lord. And life is an un- 
solved enigma unless there be some day in which 
hidden things are to be revealed. The new cre- 
ation in Christian souls is yet in some sharp throes 
of anguish, and groans while waiting for some 
expected manifestation of God. The soul knows 
itself to be now under discipline, but an eternal 
discipline is an impossible thought. Discipline is 
preparation with reference to a special result — 
to the gracious awards of a final day, and the 
glorious manifestation of the sons of God. Up 
Godward, and on toward a great and glorious 
day, run the swift thoughts of holy souls. 
In our most judicial moods there is an inward 



THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 219 

echo of the apostle's words, " God hath appointed 
a day in the which he will judge the world." 
Nor are we to associate the idea of this final day 
especially with that of the condemnation of the 
wicked. On the contrary, the idea of that day is 
mainly associated in the Scriptures with the rec- 
ognition and the final destiny of believers in 
Christ. It is review-day, in which the cup of 
water, given because of discipleship, will not lose 
its reward. It is coronation-day, in which crowns 
are to be set on the heads of humble souls, all 
unused to wearing honors on earth ; in which 
there are to be worn royal robes by those souls 
that have, in their union with Christ and in their 
inward experience, the right of admission to the 
heavenly festival. It is recognition-day, in which 
the Lord acknowledges his own. Under much 
obloquy, some of them have lived, their acts ma- 
ligned, their motives misunderstood. But they 
are to be recognized as those not ashamed of their 
Lord in those hours when their Lord and his 
cause were under reproach — are to be publicly 



220 THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

manifested, in the eyes of men and angels, as the 
sons of God. It is revelation-day. He who sits 
on the throne is ready to reward the most hidden 
service, to explain the most perplexing mysteries, 
to show how always God was right in his prov- 
idences, always just in his decisions. There is to 
come such light and glory, such excess of joy and 
rapture, that, if God did not hold it up and re- 
veal himself gently to his own, the soul might 
sink for very ecstasy. 

Some of these things will begin for us instantly 
upon our entrance to the other world. From the 
inevitable journey through the gateway of death 
there is a natural recoil. But this Christian ex- 
perience comes to the rescue and unites the two 
worlds. Something of surprise, doubtless, awaits 
us — not so much as to the kind of thing to which 
we go, as to the amount and grandeur of what is 
to be revealed to us and in us, when we awake 
there. Yet, in taking that most solemn journey, 
the soul will carry over with it, as its imperish- 
able treasure, this Christian experience. 



Hit 



